Tonle Sap
Ecommerce Platform for Cambodian farmers
A lot of Cambodian farmers are struggling because of the lack of knowledge, the difficulty to access good products and the hard weather conditions. The Platform purpose was to fill this gap and bring the right information to them. At the time of this project, Technology in Cambodia was not developped enough to be sure that farmers living in remote area would be able to use a mobile app nor if the need of such app was real.
Design Process
Identifying Need
As an expat living in Cambodia, getting to know the needs and pains of Cambodian farmers was not easy everyday. From the language barrier to the culture differences, misunderstanding was a common thing.
Despite those difficulties, we managed to meet farmers who kindly shared their experiences with us and told us about their lives.
Personas
We created a couple of personas to organize and uncover patterns in user goals, behaviors, and pain points. Each of them represented one type of users, which might address on one of problems we could solve.
Journey Map
We defined a simple Journey Map to illustrate the main steps of a farmers cultivating crops, the goal was to use it during our co-creation workshops allowing everyone to brainstorm on each steps.
Problem Space
Problem Space & Opportunities
Breaking habits
Farmers have been using the same techniques during their whole life and are reluctant to change.
Risk management
They would like to have some help to improve their livelihood without taking a huge risk.
Appropriate content
Normal written documents are not adapted to their education level as most of them don’t have enough knowledge to understand and use the content inside.
Co-creation Workshops
After this research phase, our co-creation session regrouping different actors took place. From this session, different concepts came out, the main one was about video “guides” of successful farmers explaining their daily activities.
1. Having a real farmer explaining new techniques would help farmers relate to him. 2. Explaining by showing step by step each techniques to simplify bigger processes. 3. Adding monetary value to let them compare their current income and the potential income.
Concepts
Weather forecast
Give farmers reliable and actionable information about the weather to help them avoid wasting products.
Farming packs
A pack including all the things needed to become a good farmers on a specific farming activity (For 20 chickens, food for the chickens, tools needed, guide on how to do, Experts that can help, market infos,...)
Market Guide
From knowing the location of a farm, you can receive information on which sellers has the best seeds, how much money you can get with different kinds of crops, what are the products needed, prices evolution,...
Opportunity Mapping
We defined a few points to rank the concepts and choose the best one in term of user needs, experience, development time and business value. Of course, the best parts of each ideas were combined to define a new concept.
Wireframe
Once we finished defining the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and had a clear idea of what we wanted to design, I created wireframes to make the functionality of every section in the application clearer.
Outcome
Selected UI & brand identity
As content is completely different if you grow vegetables or if you raise pigs, A clear separation of each farming activity was important, one strong color was assigned for each of them and a different navigation was designed.
This would allow farmers to dive in a farming activity and focus only on the content related to the farming activity they have selected.
Takeaways
The app is currently being developed with many details being optimized along the way. As many said before, the app release is only be the beginning… Having a product in a new market means a lot of challenges to come. The only way to make this works is to keep testing and refining the app.
