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FarmAware
UX Design
An OpenIDEO Challenge in The Food Systems Game Changers Lab, my team set out to answer the question "How might we build a better food future for everyone, everywhere?"
About the Project
Small farms and their farmers are faced with the challenge of competing against large corporate farms, which is often an uphill battle. FarmAware is a solution that helps connect farmers to resources, education, and community in the digital space.
My Role + Tools Used
UX & UI designer
Figma, Pen + Paper, lots of coffee
Client
Project Type
Project Timeline
Case Study Coming Soon!
Discover
The Challenge
The question we were tasked with was "How might we build a better food future for everyone, everywhere?" This is a very complex question and one that we were not particularly qualified to answer. So how could we approach this? Our first step was to narrow the scope before beginning to answer. There are so many different schools of thought and opportunities in this industry, and we had a long list of options to choose from. After several rounds of narrowing down our options topic by topic, we chose to focus on answering the aforementioned question through the avenue of: Upskilling Farmers Through Education
The Problem
AgFuse - A free platform for farmers and agricultural professionals to connect, share information, and form valuable associations. Some notable features are:
- Boasts a community of over 6,000 agriculture professionals.
- Members can join subject-based groups, make connections, promote business, share information.
- Does not offer any educational resources apart from news articles or blogs.
The bottom line is that while there are options for farmers to connect or educate themselves, we were not able to identify any platform or service that offers both of these things, not to mention governmental resources.
Define
Objectives
Research Goals
To gain a better understanding of the experience we wanted to create for upskilling farmers, we first needed to understand what they were currently experiencing. Since there was no previous site to pull data from, we had to get creative with our approach. The goal was to define actionable tools that could both be used through a platform but that were also relevant to a farmers' needs.
1. What challenges do small farmers face?
We wanted to discover the areas in which smaller farms needed the most help with.
2. How do small farms differ from large farms?
Knowing what sets larger farms apart from smaller farms, positive or negative, could tell us a lot about how we would approach our solution.
3. What resources or information could small farms utilize?
Our goal was to understand the missing links in small farm education and information.
Define
User Interviews
For our user interviews, my team went out to farms across local counties and were able to speak with six men and women who owned and operated a small farm. We were fortunate to find several types of farms which ranged from seasonal produce to chickens to livestock.
We gained so much insight into the daily life and work that goes into running a small farm, and we were able to identify 4 key factors that impact these farmers when competing with larger corporations for business.
- Quality
- Education
- Family
- Resources
These all play a large role in success of their business, and our interviews confirmed the direction of our initial solution. We needed to find a way to connect, educate, and provide resources for these small farms to continue to thrive.
Round 2 Outcome
Taking the feedback from our users, we made the necessary changes to achieve a better usability result for round 2 by adding our CTA buttons where necessary, cleaning up cluttered pages, and simplifying where we could. Thankfully, the second round of testing was more of a success. Overall, Round 2 of our usability testing showed an increase in navigation speed by an average of 3 seconds on Task 1, 5.2 seconds on Task 2, and 1.4 seconds on Task 3.
100%
stated they represent quality products
and an honest business.
50%
run a farm that has been passed down from
family and/or is family operated.
50%
said they needed help navigating
governmental resources.
75%
were self educated or family educated
in farming.
Size vs. Production
Further research showed that when it comes to production, the numbers are extremely lopsided. Looking at the statistics, you start to get an understanding of the frustrating situations these farmers find themselves in.
89% of all U.S farms are small family farms, yet 46% of production value comes from large farms.
What does all of this research and information tell us? With many farmers being self or family educated, struggling to access governmental resources, but also being dedicated to growing quality over quantity, we knew we needed a multifaceted solution. But before we jumped into what we wanted to create, we needed to see if there was anything out there already.
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Competitive Analysis
As a team, we conducted an extensive competitive analysis of what kinds of platforms, programs, or services were already available to these farmers. Perhaps not surprisingly, we found few options. Out of all the research we conducted, we were only able to identify two real competitors to the solution we were looking to create.
Cornell Small Farms - A program that is part of Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences "to increase research and extension for small farms." Some notable features are:
- In-person training and workshops and online courses for aspiring, new, and experienced farmers.
- 27 unique courses
- Courses are between 5-8 weeks in length
- $199-$299 priced courses based on household income
- Courses not academically accredited
AgFuse - A free platform for farmers and agricultural professionals to connect, share information, and form valuable associations. Some notable features are:
- Boasts a community of over 6,000 agriculture professionals.
- Members can join subject-based groups, make connections, promote business, share information.
- Does not offer any educational resources apart from news articles or blogs.
The bottom line is that while there are options for farmers to connect or educate themselves, we were not able to identify any platform or service that offers both of these things, not to mention governmental resources.
Problem Statement
Design
A Design Foundation
All the hours of research and work put into understanding this industry was for the purpose of creating a tool for upskilling farmers, and now it was finally time to begin applying our research to create our solution. We focused on the main challenges we discovered from our research and established a goal for each. The platform would have three main content areas:
Courses - offer relevant courses with limited time requirements.
Community - create meaningful connections to learn from and help one another
Resources - provide easy access to government resource opportunities.
The original question that started this project was "How might we build a better food future for everyone, everywhere?" Our solution was ultimately: Through connection.
Designing with Intention
Usability Testing
We conducted two rounds of usability testing with 7 users to find out how we could improve our wireframes. Each user was given three tasks, all within the different content sections of the site. Our first round resulted in several pain points for the users.
Task 1: Courses - Users were able to easily navigate to a chosen course, but were unable to move forward due to the lack of CTA button on the specified Course Page.
Resulted in 18.4 seconds average task time
Task 2: Community - Users understood the idea of the Community Page and had no issue completing the task, however, many users felt the visual overload on this page took away from the task.
Resulted in 20.7 seconds average task time
Task 3: Resources - This was the most efficient task for users. The task itself presented no problems, save some UI spacing comments.
Resulted in 10 seconds average task time
For the Course-specific page, we added a CTA button for users to start the course. We also added smaller details such as length of each course and improved spacing between elements.
The Community page brought the most changes, giving it a familiar social network style in the feed, with less clutter but more relevant information for users.
We cleaned up the Resources page, making improvements to the overall UI. We kept this page simple and straightforward, as there were little issues navigating it from round 1 of testing.
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
Competitive Analysis
As a team, we conducted an extensive competitive analysis of what kinds of platforms, programs, or services were already available to these farmers. Perhaps not surprisingly, we found few options. Out of all the research we conducted, we were only able to identify two real competitors to the solution we were looking to create.
Cornell Small Farms - A program that is part of Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences "to increase research and extension for small farms." Some notable features are:
- In-person training and workshops and online courses for aspiring, new, and experienced farmers.
- 27 unique courses
- Courses are between 5-8 weeks in length
- $199-$299 priced courses based on household income
- Courses not academically accredited
Deliver
The Prototype
I have worked on making more changes and creating the high fidelity screens since the completion of this project. Here is a short prototype of my most recent iterations.
Takeaways & Next Steps
This was mostly a research based-project, and therefore most of our time was spent on the define and discover phases while much less was spent on the design phase. I look back at our wireframes and can see a lot of mistakes that we made. But I look at this as a great thing because it shows how much I have grown since the completion of this project that I am able to see what could have been done better. Next steps will include high fidelity wireframes and a tested prototype. In the above prototype you can see a sample of the final screens and I hope to include a completely new Dashboard and a completed About Page. I would also like to expand the Courses and Community Pages to include a more comprehensive look at the progress of a specific course as well as fine-tuning the Community Page.
Given this was a team project, I am so grateful for the hard work and dedication of my teammates. This project forced me to level up my communication and listening skills. Hearing other ideas, brainstorming, and coming together to create something more than I could do on my own was a wonderful lesson in trust and humility. Furthermore, researching and learning about the farming industry, including talking to farmers and hearing their stories allowed us to create a real connection to our users. The empathy that went into this project is something I'm very proud to have been a part of and I believe it really impacts the way we design.