Florin is a digital communication platform that slows down fast messaging and centers emotional presence. Through a garden metaphor, each interaction becomes a nurturing action—watered for replied, sunlight for seen but needing more time, and resting for no reply yet. As conversations unfold, a shared plant grows, making communication feel calm, patient, and emotionally expressive.

People often misunderstand each other online because digital communication lacks tone, facial expressions, and body language.

I studied how people communicate and take part in both physical and digital spaces. I looked at identity visibility, nonverbal cues, motivation, attention, and how people show presence even when silent. I also studied behaviors like lurking, anonymity, and power dynamics to see who gets heard and how participation really happens online.

Digital communication often loses tone and emotional cues, so messages are easier to misunderstand. Quiet actions like reading or pausing still show presence, but platforms make them invisible. Online spaces also favor fast, loud responses and make slow, thoughtful engagement hard to show.

Digital communication often hides emotion. Quiet actions like reading or pausing are unseen, and fast replies take over. Without tone or pacing, people worry about being misunderstood or judged. People need a calmer, low-pressure way to stay present and connected online.

1. Make quiet presence visible. pressure.

2. Support slower, more thoughtful pacing.

3. Improve emotional clarity in conversations.

4. Reduce performance pressure.

I made several simple interactive prototypes in Replit and showed them to users to see how communication could feel slower, gentler, and clearer. Their feedback showed which ideas were easy or confusing, and the nature based style felt the calmest and most supportive, so it became the direction to continue.

I structured the IA around two main actions: exploring topics and creating new ones. The Garden shows all active topics from all friends in one calm view, making it easy to see everything growing at once. The Seed flow uses a slower, more intentional creation path, based on research that showed people need less pressure and clearer emotional pacing.

Instead of using a strict low-fidelity to mid-fidelity flow, I mixed wireframes with quick sketches to explore the garden layout early. Because the garden is metaphor driven and not based on standard UI patterns, sketches showed mood, density, and spatial layout better than grey-box frames. The wireframes clarified structure and interaction flow, giving me a clear direction for tone and layout before moving into high-fidelity design.

Most of my iteration work focused on refining the emotional tone of the garden rather than changing the layout. I tested different visual directions — garden imagery, background colors, and metaphor clarity — to find a look that felt calm, readable, and true to the concept. The layout stayed mostly the same, but the visual changes strengthened the metaphor and improved clarity before moving into the final UI.

The final UI focuses on making the garden metaphor feel more immersive and emotionally clear. I refined the visual system by replacing standard UI containers with garden-themed elements, adjusting colors, and choosing imagery that matched the calm pacing of the concept. The layout stayed the same, but the final visuals strengthened clarity, emotional tone, and the metaphor of tending conversations like plants.

1. Pushed myself to design beyond standard UI patterns and build a stronger visual voice.

2. Learned that metaphor-driven interfaces need extra clarity and restraint so they don’t overwhelm users.

3. Saw that any complexity must support meaning, not compete with it.

4. Noticed my own bias: assuming the garden metaphor felt intuitive when it actually needed clearer cues.