Fasal app onboarding — UI & UX case study
What is Fasal?
Fasal simply put, is the technology through which crops converse with the farmers in terms of what they need and when they need it. We leverage technologies like IoT (Internet of Things) that track micro and macro climatic data like canopy temperature, humidity, wind speed, rainfall etc and also track soil moisture, crop stage, crop growth characteristics to provide valuable information to the farmer like disease and pest risks, farm-level climate risk, irrigation requirements, fertigation requirements, optimum pesticide spray timing etc.
All this information is provided to the farmer via an android/iOS based mobile application.
A farmer needs to install a Fasal sensor unit on his/her farm and integrate it with the mobile application to start receiving the intelligence.
Fasal application
When a user signs up on the Fasal app, he needs to create a plot on his application that represents a specific piece of land on his farm where he is growing a particular crop. He needs to integrate the app with the sensor installed on his plot. Then he provides some details about his farm & crop so that Fasal servers can start receiving data from the sensor. After the integration, the farmer starts receiving valuable information about his plot on his app. Fasal also informs him about the growth stage of his crop and the next step he needs to take.
Now, a farmer can also track his expenditure for any farm activity and keep a record of his finances via Fasal app.
Fasal onboarding
In the previous onboarding scenario, after a farmer signed up on the app, he used to land on the empty state of the home page. After that, he had to create a plot on the app on his own. Without creating a plot, farmers didn’t see any information about his plot on the app, and as we continue to do a lot of user research, we observed that we can improve a great deal here.
To make things smoother, we decided to integrate the plot creation flow into the part of the onboarding process itself.
Now following scenarios are the use-cases of onboarding on the app by farmers:
Scenario 1. Farmers can still use the app without buying the fasal sensor unit. The only thing is he won’t get farm level dynamic intelligence. It will be general steps about cultivating any selected crop. But, farmers can still use the finance management feature which can help them understand their cultivation costs, their revenues in an intuitive way.
Scenario 2. After installing the device on the farm, the farmer installs the app. He integrates the app with the sensor system at the onboarding process, creates a plot, and provides crop details. After the set-up is complete, he starts receiving live intelligence about his farm and suggestions about the next steps to cultivate his crop.
Scenario 3. The farmer bought the device but haven’t installed it yet on his farm. He goes to onboarding, chooses to integrate with the device later, but creates a plot and provides his crop details.
Design Brief: As the design ninja of Fasal I was en-tasked with the responsibility of building an intuitive onboarding experience for our farmers.
User persona
Before we move forward, we need to understand the user’s motivation, frustrations, and day-to-day activities.
Fasal Onboarding Task-flow
The following is the mapping of the tasks the farmer would perform throughout the onboarding process.
Challenges
- Farmer should be able to sign up, verify device location and serial number, create a plot with crop details with the least number of steps possible.
- Creating a conversational UI, and each step is well understood and arranged for the farmer.
- Creating a sense of progress with each step moving forward, helping them understand where they are on the onboarding process.
- Checklist to confirm that the farmer has done all the pre-onboarding requirements regarding the Fasal sensor unit.
- Integrating physical tasks like getting (the Fasal serial no. from the back of the device) into the onboarding process seamlessly.
- Accommodate three scenarios mentioned before in one flow.
- Accommodate other regional languages with different scripts like Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi etc.
Final Screens
Conclusion
After the release, we continue to take feedback from our farmers. We were elated to find that the onboarding experience which was developed after many sleepless nights, many zoom debates and a significant number of iterations actually did it’s task in the way we wanted it to do. Farmers were very easily able to onboard themselves on the app and had control over the entire procedure. And I for one was pleased that all the hard work paid off, given the fact that onboarding is the most important aspect of building a product experience and getting it right is non-negotiable.
Fasal has contributed immensely to the lives of horticulture farmers in India to optimise the use of resources and improve the quality and quantity of crops with smart farming.
Using Fasal sensors, farmers were able to save up to 30–50% of their irrigation water usage, reduce their spraying cost up to 25–30%, and increase their yield up to 15–25%.
As more and more farmers on board our platform, we strive to make our onboarding experience much more pleasant and intuitive while welcoming new members into our Fasal farmer’s community.
Designing for farmers in India in a startup, that too solo has been an interesting challenge. A lot of my assumptions about farmers in India has been proved wrong and I found new insights about their real-life problems and their digital behaviour. Priorities of farmers are very different from millennials for whom most applications are created. Our goal is to use technology to help farmers understand crop functioning and its environment at a deeper level. I am confident going forward we will advance in our understanding of different crop variety and farmer’s daily challenges even more and try to solve them through smarter tech and innovative design.
