The University of Michigan Just Built the App This Plant Nerd Has Been Waiting For

I'm going to step out of my usual lane here for a minute, because two of my favorite things just collided and I can't not write about it.

Thing one: I'm a plant nerd. I've got a raised garden in my yard, fruit trees I fuss over more than I'd like to admit, and a habit of stopping mid-hike to figure out whether something growing along the trail is edible. It's a hobby that has occasionally slowed down a walk with my family by an unreasonable amount.

Thing two: I build websites and apps for a living.

So when the University of Michigan Herbarium launched a free plant identification app for Michigan, I was pretty much the target audience twice over.

Here's the article if you want to read it yourself: Need to ID a plant? The University of Michigan launched a free app to help

What they built

The app is called Michigan Flora, and it pulls from the Michigan Flora Online website, which itself grew out of decades of botanical work that started as a printed three-volume set back in the 1970s. It's available free on both Apple and Android.

You can identify a plant by its physical features, or look it up by common or scientific name. It gives you habitat information, whether the plant is native to the area, what conditions it grows in, and photographs. It also connects to iNaturalist, so you can photograph a plant and get help identifying it from the picture.

For someone like me, that's an unreasonably good afternoon.

The part that made me smile as a developer

Here's the detail I want to point at, because it's a small thing that tells you a lot about how this app got made.

It works without an internet connection.

Think about who actually uses a plant guide. People in the woods. People in fields. People standing in the middle of nowhere staring at a leaf. And "the middle of nowhere" is exactly where cell signal goes to die. The research collection manager on the project, Brad Ruhfel, made the point that the website was a big step forward, but you can't use a website in a place without a signal.

That's the whole thing, right there. Somebody on that team actually thought about where this tool would be used and by whom, and then built for that reality instead of for the version that would have been easier to ship.

That's what good design looks like. Not the flashy part. The part where someone imagines a real person in a real situation with no bars on their phone, and solves for that person.

I write a lot on this blog about how the best websites and apps come from listening first and building second. This is an example of it, made by a team just up the road from me.

Why the offline thing matters more than it sounds

A quick tangent for the fellow builders reading.

Offline-first is harder than it looks. It means the app has to carry its own data instead of phoning home for it, which means decisions about size, storage, and how updates get delivered. Ruhfel noted the app's information stays fixed until they push an update, which is exactly the tradeoff you accept when you build for the field instead of the couch.

It would have been so much easier to build a mobile-friendly website and call it done. They didn't. They built the harder thing because the harder thing is what the user actually needed.

That's a decision I respect enormously.

Go get it

If you like plants, or hiking, or just want to finally settle the argument about what that thing growing by your fence is, go download it. It's free, it came out of the University of Michigan Herbarium with support from the Michigan Botanical Foundation, and it's a genuinely lovely piece of work.

Thank you for reading about my nerdery. Hopefully you can get outside today!