Some Principles for Designing for Farmers 👩🌾👨🌾
🇫🇷 Une version française de cet article est disponible ici.
Three years have passed since I joined the Sencrop team as a Product Designer. By using my design skills for the AgTech, I learned a lot about farmers : their work, daily tasks, practices, crops risks…
So, I want today to share with you some design principles I learned over the past years to work for farmers.
Focus on reality and not technology 🌽
Farmers are professionals who work during the year with a lot of risks: climatic events, diseases, pests… It’s highly difficult to predict these risks and they have an important mental workload to deal with every day.
Most farmers are not interested in learning technology for technology’s sake. To them, technology provides new tools that help them improving their daily job and their environmental footprint. Moreover, technology is not a replacement for some common practices. For example, I regularly observe that farmers prefer to have a phone call with someone to get sales information rather than searching online.
To create a new service for farmers, you need to provide a true value in their daily life.
Communicate as clearly as possible 🔍
Farmers need trust and transparency from the tools and services they use.
Farmers’ incomes are based on harvests. The choice of a tool or a service to manage a production will be carefully considered because it will impact positively or badly the final incomes. So, it is necessary to explain how a system provides some benefits so you can create a real trust between your service and your users. Moreover, this trust needs to persist during the full usage of the service so you can avoid doubts appearings after a certain time. And it’s all the more true today with the systems we use everyday that evolve very fast to be more and more complex.
It’s also better to get only the required datas for the user experience provided and it’s better to be transparent on the usage made with these datas.
Adapt the choice of your medium 📃
Farmers are working in a specific ecosystem with companies and partners, they have a lot of habits.
For example, it’s more simple for farmers to subscribe to a service or to buy a product by calling an advisor rather than searching online. They are also used to signing a quote and paying with bank transfer rather than paying with a credit card online.
If they have a problem, a lot of farmers prefer to call a support or a sales team rather than sending an email or chatting through a support chat interface.
Keep in mind all these learnings to imagine the user experiences of your service.
Prioritize the readability 👁️
Readability of a UI is key for farmers. For example, the middle age of the French farmers is around 51 years old (source: Ministère Agriculture 2013) and they are usually working outside where the sun impacts the visibility of their mobile screen.
Another fact is that a lot of farmers are using OS features to enlarge fonts and contents on their phone, even on small phones.
Here are some tips to prioritise the obvious : use big fonts, include words with icons, use high colour contrast.
Adapt the way to test 👩🌾👨🌾
Farmers work in rural areas and each region has their crop specifications. So, a design team needs to adapt the way they do user research or user tests to reach their users.
Some user research with farmers can be done remotely. Platforms to do surveys like Typeform are perfect to collect a lot of feedback and it allows the farmers to respond when they have time. On the other hand, phone calls are great to get more qualitative feedback in small quantities on a specific subject.
Also, some user tests with farmers can be done remotely. Platforms for prototyping such as InVision and Marvel are perfect to test remotely some prototypes. Sometimes, it’s interesting to put in production a feature and to make it available only to a small audience so you can test it with the real time data of the users.
Agricultural trade shows are perfect occasions to discuss with farmers, customers or not, to make a user research or user test.
Finally, in a startup like Sencrop, it’s pertinent to use the skills from different teams: sales, support, marketing… to get a lot of user feedback. It’s a huge advantage to be user-centric.
I hope you find these principles useful especially if you work in the AgTech.
Thanks for taking the time to read. I finish this article by presenting our mission at Sencrop:
Our mission is to empower ALL farmers to make better decisions and reduce their crop risks, with a positive agro-environmental footprint.
It the makes sense to you, learn more about our company with our website and discover our job offers, we are hiring 😉
