Empowering Dairy Farmers in Rural India
Platform
Mobile Application
Services
Product Strategy, UX Design, Interaction Design
Client
MoooFarm
Brief
Mooofarm had already launched its mobile application with basic record-keeping and telehealth features for dairy farmers. They wanted to expand the platform from a personal tool to a community tool. Mooofarm wanted to work on the strategy and design for the transition and repositioning of the brand in the market as a cattle trading platform.
The product has to be
Used by the farmers from rural India
Knowledge dissemination to make farmers confident and encourage transparency in the market
Engaging and encouraging farmers to participate in the community
Help them expand their network
Get better leads for selling and buying cattle and expand their reach outside their villages
Overview
MoooFarm functions as an innovative Agri-tech Platform, dedicated to empowering the dairy industry. It plays a pivotal role in providing invaluable assistance, knowledge, and tools to empower dairy farmers in their pursuit of enhancing their businesses. By effectively bridging the knowledge gap among farmers, veterinarians, and dairy experts, MoooFarm facilitates comprehensive insights into various aspects of the dairy business.
Major Challenges
The product already had some users using the app regularly for record-keeping. At this point, the app drew most of its engagement through the gamification strategy which was based on monetary incentives. The strategy was working well but was not scalable and sustainable after a certain point.
So the next pieces of the app were to be strategized to
engage users in a more scalable and meaningful way.
Since the project fell into the pandemic period, we had limitations in interacting directly with the users. We had to intervene with different methods of research to get insightful data.
We had to ensure an easy fit of features into the already existing platform. This was to ensure the application does not face drop-offs from the existing users.
Key Interventions
Primary & Secondary User Understanding
The team spent the initial few weeks thoroughly understanding the existing platform and aligning themselves with the product and business goals. The team conducted in-depth discussions with various on-ground volunteers, stakeholders, and the customer service team. These discussions along with competitive research helped the team understand the target user habits and their consumption behavior. The team detailed the personas on the basis of their learnings.
Identification of Feature-Level Goals
With the platform growing, the goals and methods were to be adapted as per the requirement of the problem we were catering to. Each new phase of the product involved thorough research, identification, and evaluation of feature-level design goals. The team closely analyzed the feedback and product-level goals to go in hand with the platform's expansion and transition. A major transition in the application came across when we redesigned the existing home screen which was intended to change the way the application was looked at in the market.
The team detailed journey maps to closely observe the user behaviour. It covered the length and depth of behaviour and gaps at each stage. This helped the team identify opportunities and gaps that existed in the whole dairy system and the specific sub-category that we were targeting.
Journey Mapping
Keeping in mind the identified design goals along with the opportunities, the team started ideating on various concepts for interaction design. The team ensured in-depth discussions with the Mooofarm team for iterations to get early feedback and close any gaps that existed between the teams and the understanding of design goals. The team believes in going broad with iterations to go narrow with the most effective solutions
Jakob's Law: Users spend most of their time on other products. This means that users prefer your product to work the same way as all the other products they already know.
To ensure a smooth user experience the team leveraged the existing mental models of various platforms the users were using on a day-to-day basis.
Interaction Design
Since the application has some part of it pre-designed, there was a visual style that already existed. But since the application was at its initial stages there wasn't a visual design system for the application, it lacked some structure.
The team also worked on graphics used across the application for various purposes from function to appeal.
The team worked on creating a visual system to cater to the expanding needs of the platform.
The visual system had to ensure scalability and flexibility.
Visual & Graphic Design
Collaboration and Support - UI Development team
The team provided the UI Development team with a detailed style guide and prototypes. This was to ensure the experience was translated correctly from design to development stages. The design team reviewed the UI development to ensure UI quality and match perfect pixel designs. This also helped the team fill the design gaps that existed in the screen flows.
Key Highlights
Quick and Easy Methods to Engage in Community
With an easy Audio-to-Text conversion, it simplifies and removes any resistance that is caused by the need to type in the details of the queries/posts.
Encourage Participation in the Community
The community feed had relevant cards in between posts to encourage and nudge experts and fellow farmers to participate on the platform.
The platform showcased influencers and experts from time to time to help users follow the right people on the platform.
Catering to the changing context of issues in the dairy industry, the platform highlights the user's topics.
All the posts on the community feed went through an approval mechanism to ensure the quality of content.
To ensure the quality of cattle Ads, there was a useful amount of text and visual guidelines.
Quality Ads on the platform
The platform lets the farmers explore Cattle Ads outside their current location to expand their reach.
The parameters about the Cattle in the Ad help the farmers explore the right cattle which matches their business requirements. The Ad list is supported with filters for users to further narrow down their search to fit their requirements.