Beeco - Volunteer Tree Watering Feature

Table of contents

Overview

Budapest Municipality, FŐKERT, and the 10 Million Trees Foundation needed a way to mobilize residents to water young trees. The first 3–5 years after planting are critical, and a severe drought was forecast for 2025. They partnered with Beeco to integrate the feature into their existing eco-app.

Beeco accepted the challenge and decided to integrate tree watering directly within their green map. We – as volunteer designers – got a short 1-1,5 month timeline to research, design and integrate the feature within a 6 member UX/UI group.

I contributed to the process of designing user flows, wireframes, map views, and icon system, builing and testing an interactive Figma prototype and performing field testing to identify real-world usability issues.

Main contribution

• User flow design for a new feature integrated into a complex existing app
• Competitive analysis of 5 international tree-watering platforms
• Map view design + tree status icon system (color-coded by water need)
• Educational content: in-app tree care and watering guides
• Interactive Figma prototyping + real-world field testing

The design challenges

The need for the app was rooted in a real and urgent problem. The aim of Budapest 2023’s Climate Strategy is to create 1m² of green area per person until 2030. To meet this goal, the city partnered with NGOs like the 10 Million Trees Foundation and planted thousands of new trees across Budapest. However, increasingly severe droughts made it impossible to maintain them all. Therefore the city needed a way to involve its residents.

Integration issues

With 50+ existing categories, adding a new feature risked cluttering the map and confusing users already familiar with the interface. We needed a dedicated layer that didn’t disrupt the existing experience.

Real world usability issues

We needed to design a GPS-validated watering function — one that records each session, tracks the changing hydration state of each tree, and responds to both user activity and weather conditions.

Motivating the residents to participate

The app needed functions to motivate residents’ participation. We needed to design gamification features such as badges, points, leaderboards, and weekly challenges to sustain engagement.

Short time frame with a volunteer group

We had 1–1.5 months to research, design, and deliver an integrated MVP as a volunteer team of six with a hard campaign launch deadline.

More is comming soon...