Plan T

Context

The landscaping industry is dominated by small and mid-sized businesses that have grown quickly but haven't always had the tools to match that growth. Operations that work fine at a small scale start breaking down as client lists expand and project complexity increases. Most teams are making critical decisions how much to order, what to quote a client, which jobs to prioritize without a reliable system to support those decisions.

We wanted to understand what that actually looked like day to day. So we went directly to the people living it: project managers, sales assistants, and field staff who could tell us exactly where things were falling apart.

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Insight

What we heard was consistent across roles and team sizes.

1. Inventory tracking was mostly manual and reactive. Teams were ordering based on memory and intuition rather than real data, which led to overstock in some areas and shortages in others.
2. Clients didn't always know what they wanted until they saw it. Without visual tools to guide early conversations, project scopes kept shifting leading to costly last-minute changes.
3. Pricing was a moving target. Plant costs fluctuate seasonally, and without a way to track market prices in real time, estimates were often inaccurate by the time a project actually started.

These weren't isolated frustrations. They were structural gaps and each one was an opportunity to design something better.

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Problem

A landscaping business juggles dozens of moving parts at once: client relationships, plant inventory, supplier pricing, project timelines, and team coordination. When none of these are connected to each other, every decision becomes harder than it needs to be. A missing shipment becomes a delayed project. An inaccurate quote becomes a lost client. A communication breakdown becomes wasted materials.

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The industry needed a platform that didn't just digitize existing workflows, but actively made those workflows smarter and more connected.

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Solution

Plan-T brings the core operations of a landscaping business into one place, designed around the real workflows of the people using it.

1. Inventory and Procurement Management :Teams can track plant stock in real time, get alerted to shortages before they become problems, and generate purchase orders based on actual inventory data rather than estimates.
2. Client Planning : Project managers can build tailored plans for each client including visual references and detailed scopes so everyone starts a project on the same page and scope creep has less room to grow.
3. Market Integration and Cost Estimation : Live plant pricing feeds into the platform, making it possible to generate accurate quotes quickly and adjust estimates when market conditions shift.
4. Custom Plant Packages : Businesses can create curated plant packages based on current stock and value, making it easier to present clients with options that are both desirable and practical to fulfill.

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Design Decisions

I designed the dashboard and notifications page two of the most high-stakes interfaces in the product, since they're what users see first and return to most.

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For the dashboard, the first iteration tried to show everything at once: inventory, tasks, client projects, all in one view. Usability testing quickly revealed the problem users couldn't identify what needed their attention. The final version introduced clear visual hierarchy, prioritized critical metrics like low stock and pending orders, and made the most important information visible without scrolling.

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The notifications page had a similar issue. An undifferentiated feed of updates made it easy to miss what actually mattered. I added iconography to distinguish between new stock, low stock, and expiring items, and used color coding to help users triage at a glance. The result was a page that felt manageable rather than overwhelming and that users could act on immediately.

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Outcome

Plan-T came together as a fully realized web platform, built through close collaboration between designers and developers over 13 weeks.

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The project was an exercise in designing for operational complexity learning how to take messy, interconnected workflows and turn them into something structured, intuitive, and genuinely useful for the people running these businesses every day.