Having taken you through our market research journey I bet you’re wondering how it all came together. Results from our PMR made it clear that while farmers are interested in funding for possible expansion opportunities, equally important is the ability to access markets in order to sell these products. These farmers are especially scared of being stuck with products they are unable to sell.
Defining a point of View
Our market research showed that funding and market access were primary challenges faced by our intended target market. We further drilled down in order find out how best to serve them with a solution that solves their problem in a way that is practical. This meant we needed to define who our ‘user’ is by defining the persona of our typical user. We understood that a larger population of our users will be interacting with our solution on mobile telephones (more feature phone users than smartphone users). Therefore, our solution had to be mobile first, easy to use and require little or no literacy to operate. Information was going to be a key part of our solution but it was necessary to also hand-hold our users in their quest to take advantage of this information on markets and funding.
Prototyping
We had a wide range of ideas from which to select to prototype of our solution some of which were: a mobile application that farmers can use to access funding and markets, a newsletter for farmers to get funding related information, a voice-based farming solution that gives farmers access to markets and funding and an SMS solution for farmers where they get access to funding and markets as well as information. At this point there was a lot of confusion as to the best way to implement our solution as each potential product had its pros and cons. For us one thing was clear while the solution had to be digital it had to be so simple that as many farmers as can use our solution could benefit from it. A few problems were obvious, a mobile application would be challenging to implement with less educated farmers. As for a newsletter while an email newsletter will be effective, less educated farmers may not have easy access to email communication meaning many would be excluded from benefiting from our solution.
This meant we were down to voice-based telephone messaging and SMS messaging to reach our intended target. SMS provided a simpler option to implement so we decided to test our prototype as an SMS solution where users can register directly or through their unions for an SMS service that provides information and access to funding and markets.
We first did a paper sketch to test our prototype and define the user registration journey.
We did a final representation of our early prototype using figma and you can view it here: https://www.figma.com/proto/AwhgpS54eczj8jcLg7uHYK/Farmsmart?node-id=8%3A2&viewport=551%2C-1151%2C0.23779994249343872&scaling=scale-down
Testing
We ran a test with another team on the participating in the hackathon where we presented each other’s prototypes. Honest feedback was shared as to how best to make the product work for our target users.
Pitch Day
It came the final day to pitch our solution to a panel of judges. This needed to be a team effort delivered in seven minutes. The pitch was challenging but provided a growth opportunity for me and my team.
In all we learned a lot from the task on how design thinking helps you take a customer focused approach to solving wicked problems.
To my team you made all the effort worth it as you all made me better.
Lets help Nigeria farm smarter!