UX Case study-How might we encourage the Indian city dwellers to become urban farmers
Problem Overview
“Half of the Indian population would be urban by the year 2050. It is estimated that percentage of agricultural workers in total work force would drop to 25.7% by 2050.Thus, there is a need to enhance the level of farm mechanisation in the country” — World Bank
Why urban farming? Many cities around the world have adopted pro Urban Agriculture policies and promoted it with varying degrees of success. In India, Urban Agriculture is not a priority at the moment however majority of the urban dwellers do not realise the need for producing their own food.
The urban population in India which stands at 377 million currently is expected to grow by 404 million by 2050 — World Urbanisation Prospects, 2014
The nutritional requirements of this increased urban population have to be met. Also, with growing affluence and increasing nutritional awareness among the city dwellers, there will be increased demand for vegetables, fruits, eggs, meat, dairy products and even flowers.
The Challenge
Being a designer is not just about being creative and generating ideas, it’s also about navigating and innovating our future by tackling issues on sustainability, health, technology and the vulnerability of people. Design is about creating a better world.
Unlike engineer’s working extensively from technology or science, designers start from people and empathize with them.
Design Process
There is no specific design process to solve a problem, In this case study I have chosen the IDEO’s Human Centred Design, its a process that starts by understanding the problem my interacting with the people and come up with the solution that are tailor made for their needs. (This course on HCD by plusacumen is free and highly collaborative and engaging. I would highly recommend to enrol if you’re new to the design process)
1. Inspiration
Learn from people
- Quantitative Interview- Surveys
Conducted surveys on people with the age group of 21–40, living in and around the urban areas and came to the following conclusions and assumptions :
- Nearly 27% of the interviewers has responded that they aren’t currently involved in any type of planting.
- Out of the 73% of planters only 20% are indulged in planting food crops
- 66% of the planters says that they lack space for planting food crops.
- 25 % despite of having spaces responds that they need guidance on planting food crops.
2. Qualitative Interview — Phone interview
Conducted an unstructured phone call interview with few of my friends and neighbours to understand more about the problem and came to the following conclusions :
- Lack of space.
- Lack of knowledge on growing food crops
- Insufficient time to maintain
- Living in a colony of apartment might cause dispute with the neighbours on planting.
- Withering of plants causes emotional impact which demotivates them from planting
- Replacing soil and using fertiliser could be expensive and requires lot of knowledge.
- No or less market place to sell the farm products which leads to food wastage
Learn from Experts
1. m-Krishi
Tata Consultancy Services, a multi national company in India launched a for-profit mobile based application mKRISHI®, that uses Information and Communication Technology to help solve farming challenges.
The mKRISHI® platform harnesses five digital forces — social networks, mobility, analytics, cloud, and IoT — to create ‘market- and climate-smart’ entities. It enables the use of predictive analytics for crop acreage and yield, crop health, soil status, weather and pest forecasts, and resource quality assessment, helping farmers minimize risk.
Key Takeaways
- Set of collective information provided in a step by step guide about planting certain crops along with the weather and soil information
- Direct Interaction from farmers to sellers.
2. Sky Farm, Seoul
A new concept design by Aprilli Design Studio is a tree-like skyscraper that provides space for crop farming that solves the problem of how to use space productively and how to feed everyone.
Key Takeaways
- Idea of providing a common space for growing and selling the farm products.
Context Immersion
I visited couple of my friends and neighbours house and examined the difficulties they face, Tried having a casual conversation while watering the plants along with them.
Key Takeaways
- Usually they don’t have a specific timing to water the plants, whenever they think of or walk towards the garden or see a particular plant in the withered state, they water them
- Organising and pruning the plants are highly time consuming and challenging
- Planting is considered as a relaxing hobby as they bring peace and serene, hence withering of plants are considered to be emotionally impactful.
- Offering the farm fruits and vegetables to the neighbours are often considered as a cultural norms of being a good neighbours.
2. Ideation
Synthesis
The Ideation phase transforms the research into meaningful and actionable insights that will become the foundation of the design. It’ll begin to make sense of what learned from the design research—drawing from everything observed and heard from the people its been designing for. Then, I’ll identify key themes and insights that will help to define opportunities for design that are differentiated and generative.
It includes 5 stages
- Learnings — Downloading all the data to the individual sticky notes
- Themes — Grouping them on similarity and labeling them.
- Key Insights — Takeaways from the learnings
- How Might We Questions — Converting the key insights to the HMWs
- Ideas — Picking up each HMW’s and coming up with the possible solutions
Based on the generated ideas, I decided to go with a mobile based application that solve the above collected user needs.
User Flow Diagram
User Flows helped to organize and helps to visualize the complete path that users follow across the whole solution.
Wireframes
I used Sketchapp to quickly design the layout and the functionality of the application based on the ideas generated during the synthesis process. Wireframes helps to establish the basic structure of the product before visual design and the content is added to it.
Visual Design
- Styleguide
Started with the inspiration board and picked out the most relevant themes and collated them to a Styleguide, it helps to set standards and rules that is to be followed to improve the digital presence of the product. Pablo Stanley has demonstrated how to build a UI Kit effectively in this tutorial.
2. High Fidelity Designs
After collecting and analyzing the user demands at the early stage, I converted the design ideas to a tangible working prototype which can be used to validate and test it with the users.
3. Implementation
This phase is about bringing your solution to life, and to market in the real world. This is an iterative process and there are many user validation techniques such as Guerrilla testing, Contextual interview, Observation etc.
4. Conclusion
What did I learn?
Solving a social problem is both challenging and rewarding at the same time, In the beginning the problem was very broad and I had no clear idea to it, but following the human centred design process step by step, it helped me to split my one huge problem statement into multiple chunks of small problems that helped me to organise my vision towards the problem. A solution doesnot appear from a single mind but by collaborating with beautiful minds we can arrive at a clear solution. I understood the needs of the user by surveys and interviews that helped me to derive to the solutions to my problem statement. Finally the most challenging part is to create an application that is engaging both in user experience and visual design perspective.
Thank you for reading! Hopefully you enjoyed this case study. If you have any feedback, I’d like to hear from you. Drop me a hello at lawanya.designer@gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn
