Farmer's Digital Coffee Shop
Expertise
Platforms
Deliverables
Duration
Project Overview
An initiative by Our Sci, a software startup that build 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 farmer's 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. As of now, the tool is in development, which is a happy ending for a research initiative with a noble cause.
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 project, virtually. Sessions were structured with following progressive goals-
- Mapping Desires and Concerns of different User Groups through a how-might-we (HMW) process.
- Establishing User Needs in high specificity, using Personas with relevant benchmarking.
- Identifying and Visualizing User's Journey and the Pain-points and opportunities in it.
- 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.
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 itdentified 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.