Designing AgriTech Apps to Drive Crop Production

Our process

Design discovery → Value proposition → Information architecture  → In-depth user interviews → Wireframing → Discussion guides → Usability testing

Our design discovery started with in-person stakeholder interviews and workshops with the field agents who would be inspecting and collecting information about the farms. This helped determine what features were already included in the old app that could be migrated over, and what additional features the agents, supervisors, and our client each wanted.

Our UX researchers then teamed up with our UX designers to put together a value proposition. In this stage, we built a customer profile by identifying the jobs, pains, and potential gains of the agents. This was followed by an ideation process to determine how we could help, through products and services, pain relievers, and gain creators.

Once we determined which features would most benefit users and eliminate their frustrations, our UX designers and UX researchers collaborated to build the app’s sitemap. 

However, before our designers could progress to the next step and begin creating wireframes, our UX team needed to verify that the business assumptions made during the value proposition accurately reflected the users’ real-life needs. Therefore, we conducted in-depth, one-on-one interviews with users at mills to pinpoint issues before our team started designing. 

Furthermore, during the design process for wireframes, our UX researchers attended daily standups with our UX Designers, in order to review each development process with representatives of Ricult. This ensured that designs aligned with Ricult’s business goals and with the pain points of users, resulting in a viable, impactful final product. 

Leading up to the app’s usability testing, our UX Researchers drafted discussion guides. This outlined not only the questions to ask users during the testing process, but also generated possible scenarios that could arise from testing the app. We then applied those discussion guides to testing the app with real users in order to determine any remaining areas of the UX design that needed to be changed or fixed.

Challenges we overcame

1. Collecting user insights from multiple countries

Ricult wanted to deploy their AgriTech mobile application for mills in Thailand, Pakistan and Vietnam. In order to perform usability testing on agents working in multiple provinces in three different countries, we carried out our validation process online.

We invited local Ricult representatives, mill supervisors, and field agents to join online meetings to perform usability testing. During each test, we sent our participants a link to our wireframes, localized to the user’s language. By asking the users to share their screen, we were able to observe their on-screen journey through the app, while studying their behavior and reactions. This allowed us to collect insights from target users in each country. 

2. Avoiding blocks in recording crop yield

Our UX research revealed that the standards for measuring crop production are not the same for each mill, especially for different crops.

While sweetcorn can be measured right at the time of harvest, the yield of a sugarcane can only be measured once the crop has been processed and turned into sugar. However, in the app’s initial design, crop yield had to be measured at the time the crop harvesting was recorded in the app. This meant that agents working with sugarcane were unable to record information, and were unable to proceed to the next processes on the application.

Without our in-depth usability testing, our UX design team and our clients would not have foreseen this problem with the app’s functionality, and it is very likely that this would have resulted in blocks and dead ends in user flows.  

3. Increasing accessibility to crop health data

Ricult’s app displays crop health gathered from satellite data, which is instrumental to helping monitor farms and fields for productivity and for identifying risks. However, at least 50% of the field agents using the app did not understand the acronym Ricult used to refer to the crop health index, NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index).

We helped make this data integration more intuitive for users by altering the crop health index to ‘Health’. This allows field agents to better understand the satellite data on each farm, which then enables them to better support farmers in their crop production.