UX Case Study Unit 2: Helping Farmers Tap into their Local Community

Overview

Our team set out to create a responsive design website both on a mobile and desktop platform, centered around Social Impact as the main objective. We focused on farmers as our target user, addressing problems and solutions to help farmers tap into their local community. After extensive research, we mapped out what farmers were already doing for their community and what sort of business and social attributes they were lacking. These insights led us to create a design tool to easily connect and educate the farmer, bringing together talented folks within the community by posting and sharing workshops.

Responsibilities

I joined my two other colleagues from my cohort to tackle this research report. We all shared a passion for farming, farmers, and their influence on social communities. Together, we shared the responsibility of researching and designing a responsive design website, using the four stages of the double-diamond design process.

Problem Space

We sought after to understand an idea, questioning, How might we help growers connect with their local community? and expand their engagement. We assumed farmers had limited/outdated resources, trouble finding labor, seasonal constraints, and issues with distributing excess goods. Considering these opinions, we explored the scope of these issues mapping out solutions and further research.

Scope and Constraints

Based on a State of Emergency and time constraints. We conducted this research report during the beginning stages of the world wide spread of Coronavirus of 2020, towards the end of our report, we were mandated to self quarantine, using video and messaging devices to pursue our outcomes and design.

Users and Research

We interviewed farmers coast to coast, investigating who our target audience was and how to solve for them. We spoke with 6 farmers and highlighted key quotes, which revealed what farmers were really going through. Here are some of quotes from our participants,

“Farmers Markets required a ton of effort”

“A community that’s population is only 900 people and 70% of those people live under the poverty line.”

“…beefing up our social media presence, especially on Instagram.”

Based on our research, we targeted problems and habits that came up consistently across our interviews. Our affinity map was a tool that we did to group them visually into categories which identified our insights.

Research Synthesis

As we synthesized our data, we collected five main insights

• FARMERS NEED EDUCATION TO PROMOTE THEIR OUTREACH
• FARMERS NEED TO FIND MORE WAYS TO FIND NEW CUSTOMERS
• FARMERS WANT TO REACH A MORE DIVERSE AUDIENCE WITHIN THEIR COMMUNITY
• FARMERS NEED EMOTIONAL AND SOCIAL SUPPORT FROM OTHER FARMERS
• FARMERS NEED TO USE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL MEDIA TO THEIR ADVANTAGE

Through this, we channeled these insights which led us to create our persona, Frannie the Farmer! Her needs included, finding new customers, increasing her income, and finding a reliable source of labor.

One of her frustrations is that she needed a wider range of customers and her main goal was to learn new ways to be creative with utilizing excess goods.

So from there, we Journey Mapped and imagined a day in the life of Frannie, noting her low points which were, loading in and out of the farmers market and having excess food at the end of the day, as well as her highs, which were being social and interacting with her customers. Her day ended on a low point by not having enough help and from being exhausted. After meeting Frannie, we were able to revise our problem statement to reflect her needs and goals.

• Farmers have trouble connecting with their less affluent local communities.
• Frannie sells her products through many avenues, making ends meet. She still needs to increase her customer base to feel more financially stable and connected to the community.

We revised our problem statement saying, How might we help Frannie utilize her community resources to increase revenue on her farm?

So from here, we wanted to correspond our insights and data into our Design. We develop features that were backed by the data, for instance,

• Farmers using technology — we create an accessible internet and mobile platform, bringing together members of the community and educating them through workshops
• Farmers needing a new way to find customers— we created a feature where farmers can list your space or host an event on their farm
• Farmers needing to reach a diverse audience and emotional support — you can register and “sign up” on our platform which connects you to other members through a locator

Design

From what we learned from our research, we developed our new product called GROW. Farmers can list their space to host local workshops & events, they can invite other farmers & local craftsmen to their farm and share knowledge. To make our idea come to life, we did a design studio to brainstorm and compare our ideas with each other. This process allowed us to come up with our initial lo-fidelity sketches. Through GROW, Frannie our (MVP) can search for workshops and events near her farm and sign up for things she is interested in learning.

We asked five users to go through three scenarios and tasks on our app testing their usability and design.

Users had a difficulty finding the craft button on the bar at the top of the screen with only 3/5 users being able to find that button.

We evaluated this as an issue since there were too many competing elements at the top of this screen.

To resolve this issue, we replaced the logo on the tab bar with the “Workshops” label and placed the workshop categories under that instead.

We did a second round of tests making it a Hi-Fi prototype with colors and pictures and we noticed that the average time taken to complete each task decreased, but still discovered some new minor issues.

Outcomes and Next Steps

Our Direct/indirect success rate was 80%» 4/5 users successfully looked for craft workshops with an average time of 20 seconds and average easiness rating of ⅕. Users were sometimes confused, hitting “free” instead of “sign up” button, which they had to scroll to view. This was considered a mild issue because all users were able to complete the task.

We’d like to focus on adding in the additional features of our site as part of our next steps; the ability to attend a local event, or list a space on your farm as available to host a class or workshop.

We’d like to do a second round of user research from the community maker’s perspective, so we could then build into their section of the site, to allow them to utilize their local farms to showcase their skills uniting them with their community. The more we tap into the “why” factors that make us feel connected to our community the more we can channel that same energy and tease out answers to solve problems we think are unsolvable.