Farming Application Concepts

The client's initial idea would be designed to collect crop yield estimates from users and then allow users to compare their measurements to previous data and/or to publicly available data. This client had the advantage of being able to crowdsource information directly from farmers. However, this idea came into mind before talking with farmers which we ended up doing to investigate this concept deeper. Keep in mind that I won't be able to share too many details on the project and concepts at this moment.

Team and process

• I worked closely with the product analyst.
• We started with market and competitive research which helped create a benchmark on what’s out there and how the client’s initial vision could potentially perform a specific market segment, how it is relative to help us set realistic objectives and uncover industry trends.
• Helped plan and execute the stakeholder interviews to determine any potential gaps in understanding their views and understanding of the concept and about their users (farmers).
• Helped conducted and observed the user interviews through a 3 hour remote workshop with 5 farmers to share needs, provide feedback on ideas, and co-create solutions.
• I initiated other UX tasks such as archetypal personas of farmers to help guide concepts and understanding of key user types in this niche market.
• Multiple high-level concepts were designed by me at a high-level and refined after the user workshop.

Market and competitive research

The product analyst and I conducted extensive competitive and market research to understand the different areas of the farm tech market. Many 1st and 2nd generation farmer apps are available, spanning field to yard where there is a very competitive market in agronomy in the fields and data management. We realized there were several key success factors for the client to be mindful of when designing a new mobile application, such as needing to explore connected hardware, providing cloud solutions, making data-entry easy, provide offline access, and more.

Stakeholder and user interviews

We then conducted stakeholder and user interviews to get more insights on the intial idea and other concepts. Several stakeholders weren't 100% confident about the initial concept in terms of not understanding how they will get honest data from farmers and that capturing yield was not the company's main focus. Farmers that were researched ranged from small to large owned farms in Winnipeg that commonly grow corn, wheat and canola. We discovered that most farmers were in fact concerned of sharing their own data to another company when some already do that privately, which may pose a significant barrier to adoption of the initial concept.

After the user research, I took the initiative to create two archetypal personas of farmers to start with which could later on be modified more in detail. I thought in order to continue further in our research and conceptualization, we needed to have some guidance from a user perspective.

Designed high-level concepts

Near the end of the discovery phase, I designed high-level concepts that ranged from the initial idea to other possible ideas that would have been more desirable and viable based on the research insights. The farmers were in fact attracted to the other concepts that we provided verbally as other possible options. However, the initial idea was a fresh idea in farm tech market that needed further investigation while continuing with conceptualization. In the end, the client decided to continue with the initial concept with modifications while also exploring one of the other concepts that were shared. Below is just one example of five concepts.

2018