OurSci and General Mills
6 months

Farmer's Digital Coffee Shop

Expertise

User Research and Concept Generation

Platforms

Web Browser, iOS, Android

Deliverables

Research Insights to UI team

Duration

4 months
Farmer's Digital Coffee Shop

Project Overview

An initiative by Our Sci, a software startup that builds community research tools, and General Mills, a U.S. based food company interested in supporting regenerative agriculture, Farmer's Digital Coffeeshop (FDCS) is a digital tool to help farmers learn about Regenerative Agricultural Practices, from each other, and also from soil health researchers and other experts. We at axiLab, conducted the User Research for the tool and also generated some concepts, to pass on to the User Interaction team.

Execution

User Research for the tool was conducted using a participatory approach, involving farmers with different levels of experience, soil health researchers, and technology developers. For the same, all identified stakeholders met sporadically over the duration of the project, virtually. Sessions were structured with the following progressive goals-

  • Mapping Desires and Concerns of different User Groups through a how-might-we (HMW) process.
Image: Mapping Desires and Concerns of different User Groups through a How-Might-We (HMW) process.
Image: Clustering participant responses through Affinity Diagramming
  • Establishing User Needs with high specificity, using Personas with relevant benchmarking.
Image: Persona for a farmer exploring the tool for knowledge on Regenerative Agriculture.
  • Identifying and Visualizing User's Journey and the Pain-points and opportunities in it.
Image: Mapping a user's flow in the tool for varying goals.
  • Researching best benchmarking practices for data within the tool, through a Market Survey and Comparative Analysis of similar tools.
  • Conveying insights to stakeholders using Storyboards and Component Cards.
Image: Storyboards communicating the tool's concept and its MVPs.
Image: Component Cards to convey design insights in a scannable and actionable manner.

Results

Major highlights of the process-

  • Identifying the MVP User Group, post creating in-depth Personas for all likely User Groups- Engaged and Experienced Farmer, Exploring Farmer, Soil Health Researcher, and Public and Non-Participating Farmer- surfaced contextual understanding of the tool for each group, which was extremely helpful later on.
  • The concept of 'Data Wallet' for a farmer, analogous to an actual wallet, as a convenient and universal way of sharing Agricultural data.- to provide control and ownership in data sharing.
  • Embedding 'Survey Stack'- a data collection tool, and 'Hylo', a community coordination tool, to skip re-inventing the wheel for social interaction and information exchange within the tool, both of which were identified as essential to the goal of peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.
  • Culminating the insights through 'Component Cards' resulted in more scannable and optimized records with only the relevant fields, as opposed to an extensive documentation of the process.