Produce Safely
A mobile record keeping app for farmers
Fruit and vegetable farmers in Minnesota with sales between $250,000 - $500,000 are required by the FDA to track and keep records of their produce. These records are critical when food safety events happen. Additionally, produce wholesalers require record keeping as a condition of partnering with farmers, creating an additional incentive.
Farmers are busy when working in field and farm environments, they have many competing priorities which can make time-consuming record keeping a pain point. Dr. Cindy Tong, the primary researcher on the MDA funded-grant, would like to improve or create a digital platform to support the processes through which medium-sized fruit and vegetable farmers in MN can remember to record, complete, and access necessary produce safety-tracking requirements with minimum effort.
The Problem
One of the biggest ways of record keeping on farms is currently through pen and paper. Papers get messy from dirt, water, etc in the working environment.
Record keeping is critical for farmers who want to sell to wholesalers, as well as FDA traceability.
The Proposal
Dive into the contextual space of a farmer to further understand current record keeping flow, pain points, and goals.
Aquire insight into the USDA audit and FDA regulatory requirements, and how that applies to medium sized fruit and vegetable farmers.
The Solution
Build a mobile app for the farmer who is always on the go, working 16 hour days, and doesn’t have time to record data in the field.
Design a set up flow for the admin to adjust information to their specific farm, and a crew lead facing side for the manager who is in the field in charge of log data entry.
Tools/Methods
Deep Dive / Competitive Audit / Secondary Research / Fly On The Wall Observation / Contextual Inquiry / Interviews / Wireframes / Feature Cards / Interactive Survey / Usability Testing
Research
After meeting with our client, the team was tasked with creating a digital solution for medium sized fruit and vegetable farmers to collect that data they needed to meet the requirements for the FDA regulations on food safety.
We realized that we needed to immerse ourselves as much as possible with the farming community in order to target commonalities, and outliers that would later help shape the direction we were headed in. It was also pinnacle that we understand the inner workings of the FDA regulations, what makes a medium sized farmer, what traceability was and its process, as well as audits from wholesalers. To do that, I performed a deep dive into the regulation space, while several other team members branched off to strategize our workflow.
Offsite
In order to know the inner workings of how farmers (or growers as we came to know they like to be referred to as) operate, we headed out to several farms and farming conventions to conduct contextual inquiries, and interactive surveys.
Ideate
After research was complete it was time to uncover our main takeaways so we could hone in on what it was our users really needed. Some of the key insights we came away with were:
Farmers often have little time to spend on their phone and want to minimize the amount of effort put into record keeping.
Accountability was repeatedly mentioned as a valuable asset, being able to see when things are getting done and being notified when something has not been completed.
Developing a record-keeping habit has been a pain point.
The flow of data entry was recognized as being highly sought after
It is highly suggested that the tool be buildable as regulations continue to grow and change.
Retrospective recordkeeping is a pain point. It is frustrating to spend time entering information at the end of the day when it could have been done in the moment.
Information organization needs more context. Icons and a title do not provide enough information.
Language as a barrier as a blocker for immigrant farmers.
Ecosystem Map
Understanding the ecosystem of famers, wholesalers, FDA, and USDA regulations was key to developing an app that helped solve user pain points.
User Persona
Research findings were collected, synthesized and ultimately made into a mock persona which showed the average mean of what our users wanted and needed. This helped the team to be able to reference back whenever we weren’t sure what our next steps were in the ideation process.
Usability Testing
Once we had a direction of how we needed to build our mobile prototype it was time to get it in front of users to see how they interacted with app. The information was invaluable, and helped further shape the functionality, process flows, and UI for what would be come the final high fidelity prototype for our client.
Preparing to present
To conclude our project, we presented our findings in a keynote slide, along with video walkthrough’s of the prototype to demonstrate its usage, functionality, and values to it’s future users.
We followed several user flows through the prototype. However, I designed the flow for James Barr, a local grower who needs to pass the GAP audit in order to make sure he can sell to wholesalers. In order to do that we are take through the Harvest and Traceability log steps of completion on our Produce Safely app.
Final deliverables
As the lead designer I wanted to make sure I was incorporating the following features within the prototype deliverable to meet our user goals:
Fulfills GAP (or Good Handling Practices) audit
Farmers can record in the field as they go
Data must be recorded every day
Promotes Accountability
Simple, color-coded, large UI elements make up the majority of the interface
Minimal clicking/touching between screens and on elements
Auto Populates data whenever possible
Right-sized data - shrinks/expands with documentation