Sustainability through fertiliser management
Understanding how fertiliser might be better managed on orchards to reduce agricultural emissions. This involved working closely with the growing community to conduct research and co-design potential solutions.
Working with a group of Service Designers and agricultural subject matter experts to discover, define, and design with the fruit growing community.
Research was conducted with the fruit growing community and companies that provided fertiliser related services. The project team split into pairs to conduct interviews and captured notes in a shared file.
The team worked together to synthesize finding by grouping key concepts into themes. Insights were used to produce a journey map of the fertiliser life cycle to highlight current pain points. This was played back to stakeholders to highlight the challenges faced by the growing community.
We worked as a project team to define where we should focus our effort to have the most impact on the current pain points. Through this process we decided to focus on standardising fertiliser recommendations and supporting data flow between companies and growers. We developed storyboards for potential solutions and workshopped the concepts with the growing community. Through this process we were able to refine our designs for further user testing.
We developed a low fidelity data collection tool in the form of a spreadsheet to test with the growing community. This was done primarily to understand if the data would flow correctly between the various touch points. Through this process we refined our design until we had an MVP. The requirements were then captured as user stories ready for development.
Due to the scale of the research it was difficult to ensure consistency of user interviews. This created variance in the length of the interviews and level of detail in the notes. The process of synthesizing the interviews into themed insights was also more time consuming than anticipated.
Designing for the community was challenging as each group operated independently in the life cycle and had different motivations. The design needed to be effective in addressing the pain points but there also needed to be an incentive for each party to adopt the proposed solution.
The process of synthesising the findings as a team helped everyone get on the same page. Through this process we were able to share and discuss relevant moments from user interviews to further contextualise the insights.
The journey mapping process helped summarise key findings. This also proved to be a simple and effective way of updating stakeholders and contextualising the next steps of the design process.
We used a storyboard and a low fidelity prototype to test one of our concepts with the growing community. The storyboard was able to provide context and the prototype provided something tangible to centre the conversation around.
The choice to use a spreadsheet as a prototype for our MVP enabled us to work across the growing community since it was a tool that was already being used. Using a spreadsheet also enabled the team to rapidly iterate throughout the testing process.