NYBG Plant Tracker

I designed the Plant Tracker app for the New York Botanical Garden, giving visitors the ability to create self-guided tours, explore building and plant histories, and see what's in bloom right now. That last part was one of the bigger design challenges.

Seasonal variation is real. The same garden looks completely different in April versus October. A visitor planning a trip in July needs to know what they'll actually see, not what looked great in a spring photo shoot. The app accounts for this by surfacing seasonal data and adjusting recommendations based on the time of year. It sounds simple, but the underlying plant data changes constantly as specimens are added, moved, or go dormant.

The mapping needed to work in two very different ways. First, as wayfinding, helping people navigate a 250-acre garden without getting lost. Second, as an educational tool, letting users tap on a location and learn the story behind what's planted there. Balancing those two modes in a single interface took a lot of iteration. Too much information and it becomes a textbook. Too little and it's just a GPS dot on a green rectangle.

I built the UI flows for mobile first, keeping the interactions simple enough for a casual tourist but deep enough for a serious botanist. The visuals are vibrant and intentional, matching the energy of the garden itself. It's the kind of project where the subject matter does a lot of the heavy lifting if you give it room to breathe.