FarmHand is designed with the small farmer in mind, to make their lives easier by strengthening connections with their existing customers. For this project, we put our farmers first, designing tools to to help farms refine their standard operating procedures around inventory management systems and sales.
With FarmHand by their side, farmers can do more of what they know and love in the fields, without losing precious daylight to hands-on inventory management, sales, and record keeping.
Growing, processing and distributing a perishable product requires detailed oversight.
In the height of the season, farmers need every minute in the fields. With few tools working for farmers to automate systems to help manage inventory, sales, and record keeping during the height of their season, many farmers are forced into overdrive, exhausting themselves by the end of the season.
FarmHand helps to manage a farms inventory logistics and communication with their existing client base through passive technology. Seamlessly, FarmHands organization and management tools to integrate into the standard operating procedures of small farms.
Small scale farmers wear many hats, though most farmers derive value and meaning from the act of growing and harvesting in the fields. Dealing with inventory management, sales, and administrative tasks is inevitably part of the job, and can be fulfilling, but how might we make these tasks easier for farmers?
To test the assumptions I formed from my personal experience farming, our team wanted to gather more information on what issues farmers face beyond growing and cultivation, and how we might be able to help.
To test some of our assumptions and to gain more perspectives, we sent a survey to the Eastern Massachusetts Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training and U.S. Farmers Market Coalition members. Over 24 hours we received 34 responses and heavy interest in participating in 1:1 interviews. Majority of respondents were growing for customers in Eastern Massachusetts.
“Communication is challenging because we are contacted from so many different means - we get phone calls, emails, messages through our website, messages, through Google, and messages from sources that I didn’t even know existed. We have to stay on top of all those avenues to avoid disappointing a customer or potential customer.”
— Farm Manager, MA
“I rarely want to talk to customers unless I am at a farmers market, which I rarely do. But I have weekly messages that I have to send out, and follow up emails with invoices. I’d like to automate all that.”
— Farm Owner, RI
“If I had time during the season to manage my spreadsheet that would be helpful. For now it is managed ‘in my head’”
— Farm Manger, MA
“I have been unable to make [farming] not fully life-consuming.”
— Farm Owner, NC
1. Facilitate easy pickup scheduling
2. Create more intuitive book search ability
3. Predictable book availability features
4. Social connection through the app
5. Customization based on diverse user needs and tech literacy rates
During our market research phase, we found a comprehensive resource created by the National Young Farmers Coalition, listing available sales platforms for farms. However, none of our research participants had used—with most never having heard of—any of the sales platforms listed. We examined the 19 listed software platforms and 5 additional platforms we found along the way.
Existing farm software...
Keeping in mind how we can design a product truly for farmers required us to strongly consider how our product would integrate seamlessly into the lives and procedures of farmers today. Our research led to the development of a mobile app to improve farm inventory management by converting crop spreadsheets into predicted yields and harvest dates that are shared with existing customers through an accessible, self-regulating interface.
Our research suggested farmers struggle equally with employee management and inventory management. By getting information out of farmers’ heads and consolidated and integrated in a mobile application, Our application can serve as an integrated hub for managers to communicate with their employees. With more insight into product sales, farm employees can gain professional development through a better understanding of the business side of farms.
In addition to helping to manage inventory, with streamlined data collection farm stakeholders can gain a clearer picture of sales throughout the season to help drive decision making for next season. These metrics provide insight into the bigger picture for all of roles within small-scale farms.
Finally, automated crop availability and an integrated sales platform aids in communication with customers for availability, delivery, invoices, and more.
ISBN numbers, printed on all books, allows users to easily search for books on the go
With the search feature, users can quickly check for book availability, send books to friends, place books on hold, and more
With course readings, students often engage with texts differently, reading sections or chapters of books
Students can easily log books they’ve read, save notes on specific sections, and track their reading timelines
Receive a reminder to read for the day. Grab a book, get cozy, and settle in for a reading session
In the reading space, users can gather to read in an anonymous setting, with touchpoints along the way to encourage daily reading habits and to provide users with incentives to read
Engage with your books by recording your thoughts, so you have something to reference to as needed
See statistics on your reading, share your thoughts with others, and easily find similar titles and other works and publications by the author
PubLib is a public library interface for the future. It embraces the transforming needs of communities and the hybrid features of today's public library spaces. With PubLib and machine learning, materials borrowing services are more accessible and predictable for patrons. In addition, PubLib offers comfortable features of the library in one's own home, and features that allow users to catalog their readings, by making it easy to discover books and get more out of reading.
PubLib’s homepage visually presents users current reading progress. The library app pairs with users digital or audio books reading progress through OverDrive.
For borrowed hard copybooks, users can easily additionally input their reading progress with an opt-in notification feature. To bring further awareness to readers interests, the homepage automatically displays a book’s publisher and BISACCategory.
An improved pickup scheduler allows for friends, book club or reading group participants, and neighbors to easily organize group pickups.
From here, users can easily navigate to edit reading progress, pickup scheduling, book queues, and their reading journal.
WithPubLib’s reading progress tracking, the library can calculate users’ average reading speed.
The scheduler displays predictions for when a user will return a book or pickup their next read. This feature aligns with the library’s existing 10 day holding period for reserved books, providing users with room for flexibility.
Students interact with books differently than people reading for leisure. Often, they are reading several books at a time for different classes, while reading a book cover to cover is also less common. PubLib’s student shelf feature allows students to organize their shelf in whatever way best supports their learning.
Here, students can follow along with their reading group, allowing users to track reading group activity and comments.
User book review features can change to book notes in the student shelf portal. This feature tracks a student’s relationship with a book, when they first logged a book, and whey they last engaged with it.
Finally, to emulate the feeling of reading or studying inside a library — independently, yet amongst others— the app provides both a reading space and a study space for users to gather, anonymously, to read or work.
The reading and study spaces can provide users with a non-overbearing nudge to read or study in an anonymous group setting. After sessions, users are given “overviews” and the option to allow the library app to remind them to read or study the next day.
For interested users, the reading space records data so they can gauge a sense of how long it took to read a book or study a certain topic.
The virtual library features allow users tore-think online community formation—maintaining user-agency even when online and creating social campaigns that draw users to engage outside digital formats.
FarmHand is a tool that helps small-scale farmers with inventory management throughout the season and to plan for future seasons. Inventory and sales management and data collection helps to protect the longevity of the farm by recording successes and areas of improvement throughout the season for stakeholders. Farmers feel that software for the small scale farmer is lacking, and our team received much interest from small scale farmers for tech innovations to address their management challenges.
"To help me manage when things feel unmanageable... [FarmHand] could be a game changer"
-Farmer, MA
FarmHand serves as a centralized application to help farms function internally. Unexplored in this case overview is the ability of FarmHand's collaborative capacity as a stepping stone to allow farmers to partner with other farms in the area.
Majority of our survey respondents sell in Eastern MA, growing in the area in suburbs or rural locations. Massachusetts has a robust network of small-scale farms and high customer interest and retention for Community Supported Agriculture (aka CSA) programs. This farming model we focused on does not necessarily reflect farmers needs across the nation. However, with the pandemic creating high demand for locally sourced food and CSA shares, we believe FarmHand could be an instrumental tool for farms in the future.
FarmHand is designed with the small farmer in mind, to make their lives easier by strengthening connections with their existing customers. For this project, we put our farmers first, designing tools to to help farms refine their standard operating procedures around inventory management systems and sales.
With FarmHand by their side, farmers can do more of what they know and love in the fields, without losing precious daylight to hands-on inventory management, sales, and record keeping.
Growing, processing and distributing a perishable product requires detailed oversight.
In the height of the season, farmers need every minute in the fields. With few tools working for farmers to automate systems to help manage inventory, sales, and record keeping during the height of their season, many farmers are forced into overdrive, exhausting themselves by the end of the season.
FarmHand helps to manage a farms inventory logistics and communication with their existing client base through passive technology. Seamlessly, FarmHands organization and management tools to integrate into the standard operating procedures of small farms.
As a former farmer, I wanted to build a product designed for farmers, not just their customers. I wanted a product that could help small scale farmers in their formative years to organize their processes and, overall, improve their lives of farmers by lightening their loads.
This was a six week project completed in the fall of 2020. I pitched the project idea and was lucky enough to have two colleagues interested in collaborating with me. My personal experience farming along with conversations with other farmers guided my initial pitch. I was humbled to share this project with talented individuals who did not have any farming background, and with whom we could generate ideas. The perspectives and specialties of my teammates Denis and CJ were invaluable during this design process.
Small scale farmers wear many hats, though most farmers derive value and meaning from the act of growing and harvesting in the fields. Dealing with inventory management, sales, and administrative tasks is inevitably part of the job, and can be fulfilling, but how might we make these tasks easier for farmers?
The photos above show instances of inventory management getting out of hand during my experience as a farm manager for a specialty cut flower farm. These scenes are not atypical -- harvests come in by the truckload and can quickly fill coolers and storage spaces after processing. Selling a perishable product at a localized level takes strategy and energy, and during the crunch of the high season, the logistics around sales and inventory becomes more chaotic, unorganized, and time consuming.
“During the growing season, my farm will consume every minute of every day… When the sun sets, the last thing in the world I want to do is spend time posting to social media and managing customer questions [to sell products].”
-Farm Manager, CT
In a farmer's ideal world, everything grown has already been sold. However, with the unpredictability of growing diversified crops, even this system does not account for unexpected yields. With many farms growing 50+ varieties to satisfy customer demand for new things each week at markets or in their member shares, the task of predicting how much material to grow, and successfully growing high quality -- sometimes challenging, novel crops -- adds to unpredictability and farmers' high-season stress levels.
To test the assumptions I formed from my personal experience farming, our team wanted to gather more information on what issues farmers face beyond growing and cultivation, and how we might be able to help.
To test some of our assumptions and to gain more perspectives, we sent a survey to the Eastern Massachusetts Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training and U.S. Farmers Market Coalition members. Over 24 hours we received 34 responses and heavy interest in participating in 1:1 interviews. Majority of respondents were growing for customers in Eastern Massachusetts.
“Communication is challenging because we are contacted from so many different means - we get phone calls, emails, messages through our website, messages, through Google, and messages from sources that I didn’t even know existed. We have to stay on top of all those avenues to avoid disappointing a customer or potential customer.”
— Farm Manager, MA
“I rarely want to talk to customers unless I am at a farmers market, which I rarely do. But I have weekly messages that I have to send out, and follow up emails with invoices. I’d like to automate all that.”
— Farm Owner, RI
“If I had time during the season to manage my spreadsheet that would be helpful. For now it is managed ‘in my head’”
— Farm Manger, MA
“I have been unable to make [farming] not fully life-consuming.”
— Farm Owner, NC
During our market research phase, we found a comprehensive resource created by the National Young Farmers Coalition, listing available sales platforms for farms. However, none of our research participants had used—with most never having heard of—any of the sales platforms listed. We examined the 19 listed software platforms and 5 additional platforms we found along the way.
Existing farm software...
Keeping in mind how we can design a product truly for farmers required us to strongly consider how our product would integrate seamlessly into the lives and procedures of farmers today. Our research led to the development of a mobile app to improve farm inventory management by converting crop spreadsheets into predicted yields and harvest dates that are shared with existing customers through an accessible, self-regulating interface.
Our research suggested farmers struggle equally with employee management and inventory management. By getting information out of farmers’ heads and consolidated and integrated in a mobile application, Our application can serve as an integrated hub for managers to communicate with their employees. With more insight into product sales, farm employees can gain professional development through a better understanding of the business side of farms.
In addition to helping to manage inventory, with streamlined data collection farm stakeholders can gain a clearer picture of sales throughout the season to help drive decision making for next season. These metrics provide insight into the bigger picture for all of roles within small-scale farms.
Finally, automated crop availability and an integrated sales platform aids in communication with customers for availability, delivery, invoices, and more.
Our team's product goals focused on creating an integrated application that would include tools for task delegation to employees, communication with stakeholders, and easily understandable and customizable analytics. We sought to understand how on-farm operating systems currently function. Our solution utilizes and builds on these existing systems. FarmHand stacks the functions of existing crop planning spreadsheets beyond their on-farm functions. Through a single platform, farmers can utilize their crop planning spreadsheets to communicate crop availability to customers. Finally, at the end of the season, farmers can easily export the season's data with accurate harvest yields and sales to help plan for the next growing season!
In the winter, farmers can import their crop planning spreadsheets. The amounts seeded, dates for seeding, transplanting, and harvest windows are predicted specific to each variety on the crop plan.
FarmHand translates the data so it can be easily shared and read by farm shareholders and employees to gain a clear picture of the upcoming season.
The application begins predicting yields for the season. Farm customers can get a peek into the upcoming season's availability.
This initial release generates excitement and funding at the start of the season, providing farmers with secure income to purchase necessary early-season expenditures.
Starting in March with seeds planted, FarmHand uses seed origin germination rates and previous years data to predict yields.
In June, farmers can see how much product has been purchased by customers through FarmHand.
By September, many final yields and purchases are recorded and easily made available for farmers.
Field tasks are outlined and prioritized to get harvests completed and processed, packed, and delivered.
Employees can add notes to tasks or new tasks to be completed to to-do-lists.
On the farmers' homepage, users can view specs and click through for more details. At a glance, users can easily see what crops are being planted, harvested, and sold, and the biggest customer orders for the week.
Through FarmHand, farmers can manually adjust inventory items according to actual yields. Most experienced farmers have a sense of which crops are grown successfully, and which crops might yield lower than typically advised.
On FarmHand, farmers can keep notes on new, novel or trial crops. With successful cultivation during the season, farmers can easily post previously hidden crops for customers to purchase.
Similarly, farmers can quickly identify crops with lower yields than predicted to make plans for substitutions.
Successfully completed sales allow orders to be processed according to customer account type— member, restaurant, market, etc.
Delivery dates, locations, notes, and customer contact information is displayed for a fluid delivery route completion. Complete invoices allow drivers to ensure all order items are accounted for.
With restaurant accounts, for example, customers can specify delivery windows, and point of contact for deliveries.
With FarmHand, at the end of the season farmers don't have to be daunted with the task of recalling details on how the season went.
Crop dates, yields, and sales have been saved with FarmHand. Throughout the season, farmers can export data for quarterly stakeholder meetings and fundraising campaigns.
After passively collecting inventory data all season, farmers can export the season's data to kickstart planning for another successful season!
FarmHand is a tool that helps small-scale farmers with inventory management throughout the season and to plan for future seasons. Inventory and sales management and data collection helps to protect the longevity of the farm by recording successes and areas of improvement throughout the season for stakeholders. Farmers feel that software for the small scale farmer is lacking, and our team received much interest from small scale farmers for tech innovations to address their management challenges.
"To help me manage when things feel unmanageable... [FarmHand] could be a game changer"
-Farmer, MA
FarmHand serves as a centralized application to help farms function internally. Unexplored in this case overview is the ability of FarmHand's collaborative capacity as a stepping stone to allow farmers to partner with other farms in the area.
Majority of our survey respondents sell in Eastern MA, growing in the area in suburbs or rural locations. Massachusetts has a robust network of small-scale farms and high customer interest and retention for Community Supported Agriculture (aka CSA) programs. This farming model we focused on does not necessarily reflect farmers needs across the nation. However, with the pandemic creating high demand for locally sourced food and CSA shares, we believe FarmHand could be an instrumental tool for farms in the future.
FarmHand is designed with the small farmer in mind, to make their lives easier by strengthening connections with their existing customers. For this project, we put our farmers first, designing tools to to help farms refine their standard operating procedures around inventory management systems and sales.
With FarmHand by their side, farmers can do more of what they know and love in the fields, without losing precious daylight to hands-on inventory management, sales, and record keeping.
Growing, processing and distributing a perishable product requires detailed oversight.
In the height of the season, farmers need every minute in the fields. With few tools working for farmers to automate systems to help manage inventory, sales, and record keeping during the height of their season, many farmers are forced into overdrive, exhausting themselves by the end of the season.
FarmHand helps to manage a farms inventory logistics and communication with their existing client base through passive technology. Seamlessly, FarmHands organization and management tools to integrate into the standard operating procedures of small farms.
As a former farmer, I wanted to build a product designed for farmers, not just their customers. I wanted a product that could help small scale farmers in their formative years to organize their processes and, overall, improve their lives of farmers by lightening their loads.
This was a six week project completed in the fall of 2020. I pitched the project idea and was lucky enough to have two colleagues interested in collaborating with me. My personal experience farming along with conversations with other farmers guided my initial pitch. I was humbled to share this project with talented individuals who did not have any farming background, and with whom we could generate ideas. The perspectives and specialties of my teammates Denis and CJ were invaluable during this design process.
Small scale farmers wear many hats, though most farmers derive value and meaning from the act of growing and harvesting in the fields. Dealing with inventory management, sales, and administrative tasks is inevitably part of the job, and can be fulfilling, but how might we make these tasks easier for farmers?
To test the assumptions I formed from my personal experience farming, our team wanted to gather more information on what issues farmers face beyond growing and cultivation, and how we might be able to help.
To test some of our assumptions and to gain more perspectives, we sent a survey to the Eastern Massachusetts Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training and U.S. Farmers Market Coalition members. Over 24 hours we received 34 responses and heavy interest in participating in 1:1 interviews. Majority of respondents were growing for customers in Eastern Massachusetts.
“Communication is challenging because we are contacted from so many different means - we get phone calls, emails, messages through our website, messages, through Google, and messages from sources that I didn’t even know existed. We have to stay on top of all those avenues to avoid disappointing a customer or potential customer.”
— Farm Manager, MA
“I rarely want to talk to customers unless I am at a farmers market, which I rarely do. But I have weekly messages that I have to send out, and follow up emails with invoices. I’d like to automate all that.”
— Farm Owner, RI
“If I had time during the season to manage my spreadsheet that would be helpful. For now it is managed ‘in my head’”
— Farm Manger, MA
“I have been unable to make [farming] not fully life-consuming.”
— Farm Owner, NC
Book and media borrowing is still a vital service 80% of Americans say no cost access to books and media is the most important service libraries provide (Pew Research)
Libraries need to help people feel that they belong in a scholarly conversation
They must “create a sense of social pride in knowledge sharing”
- David Adjaye, Architect, panel discussion
The sensory experience of being a in library nudges people to work / think
“The collections really are incredible… there’s a wisdom… a sense that there is so much history in this room”
- Former librarian, interview
Public libraries lack a social aspect
Some way “to know people more maybe? Sometimes, writing can be lonely… I remember wondering, that person looks so focused over there, whats that person working on?”
-Grad student, interview
The Library is an extension of home, work, and recreational space
“It was a place to take your kids, entirely for free, to stimulate their mind, even after preschool or elementary school”
-Former board member, interview
Libraries need a stronger online presence-- to extend access to libraries beyond visitation
“Letting people see bits of it they would not otherwise see...give people a taste for what happens behind the scenes”
-Oxford Librarian, article
Keeping in mind how we can design a product truly for farmers required us to strongly consider how our product would integrate seamlessly into the lives and procedures of farmers today. Our research led to the development of a mobile app to improve farm inventory management by converting crop spreadsheets into predicted yields and harvest dates that are shared with existing customers through an accessible, self-regulating interface.
Our research suggested farmers struggle equally with employee management and inventory management. By getting information out of farmers’ heads and consolidated and integrated in a mobile application, Our application can serve as an integrated hub for managers to communicate with their employees. With more insight into product sales, farm employees can gain professional development through a better understanding of the business side of farms.
In addition to helping to manage inventory, with streamlined data collection farm stakeholders can gain a clearer picture of sales throughout the season to help drive decision making for next season. These metrics provide insight into the bigger picture for all of roles within small-scale farms.
Finally, automated crop availability and an integrated sales platform aids in communication with customers for availability, delivery, invoices, and more.
To communicate my design idea, I settled on a spatial mockup of the library, which showcases the importance and value of traditional library services, and how improved physical space, and digital tools, both mobile and web, could enhance members experiences. Although many companies both private and nonprofit are working to address some of the urgent crises we currently face, innovation and problem solving cannot be limited to the workplace. Learning, thinking, sharing, can should and must be expanded beyond offices, into the public realm in an equal, inclusive space.
My initial storyboard followed two main characters interacting with their library and each other, through the library’s physical space and supportive digital tools, such as PubLib. Upon sketching out the storyboard in more refined, but still slightly unpolished style, I realized that the focus on a user’s interaction with their localized mobile application and local library could be explored further. After presenting to some colleagues, their comments reinforced my concerns about focusing purely on local systems. Particularly, considering the growing interconnectivity of our society, my project needed a web-based resource to connect local library members with a larger national network. These concerns were in line with what I was thinking of designing.
Among my initial questions for this project was how to connect libraries around the nation, to allow for more bargaining power for public library funding. A national network would strengthen a greater community of library members sharing ideas and projects.
Engage with knowledge artifacts at your public library
Generate ideas and innovation that are locally formed and locally relevant
Connect with your local library members and librarians to collaborate
Upload your projects to Taproots to share your work with the national networks, give and receive feedback, and discover similar projects
Utilize the Taproots network to bring your projects to life within your community
Our team's product goals focused on creating an integrated application that would include tools for task delegation to employees, communication with stakeholders, and easily understandable and customizable analytics. We sought to understand how on-farm operating systems currently function. Our solution utilizes and builds on these existing systems. FarmHand stacks the functions of existing crop planning spreadsheets beyond their on-farm functions. Through a single platform, farmers can utilize their crop planning spreadsheets to communicate crop availability to customers. Finally, at the end of the season, farmers can easily export the season's data with accurate harvest yields and sales to help plan for the next growing season!
What story needs to be told to highlight the library’s value in the 21st century? The research suggests that it comes down to a matter of agency: of belonging, and community building. Part of that belonging has to do with agency over the creation of knowledge artifacts, and the opportunity for interaction with these locally formed and realized artifacts.
Evaluators felt that the changing purposes of libraries to always meet the needs of its population makes it difficult to form a singular identify for libraries across the nation. However, a national network, like Taproots would strengthen a greater community of library members sharing ideas and innovations born out of the library.
The designs showcase the importance and value of traditional library services—how improved physical spaces and digital tools could enhance user experiences.
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To view Taproot's concept prototype, please view in larger browser
✨
In her home, Ingrid is in the library’s virtual “Work Space.” As a freelancer, she often uses this feature when she is working from home. She finds that the “Work Space” sessions create a sense of soft community, allowing her to retain agency while in an anonymous group setting.
She gets a notification that someone has viewed her Taproots page. On the app, Ingrid can view David’s profile and his recent reads-- they share interests in art, equality of access, and community building projects.
David and Ingrid message back and forth.
They plan to meet at the library the next day to talk more about Ingrid’s project displayed at the Taproots Hub.
Before heading out, Ingrid messages her neighbor, Elena, to arrange to pick up Elena’s library books for her. Ingrid can easily arrange a joint pickup through the app.
Through this relationship, Ingrid and Elena have had richer conversations about the books they have been reading.
David, Ingrid, Ali, and Larry collaboratively find a way to connect tenants moving out of their apartments with drivers, who deliver furniture directly to recently housed folks in their new apartments. All with the help of their library network!
FarmHand is a tool that helps small-scale farmers with inventory management throughout the season and to plan for future seasons. Inventory and sales management and data collection helps to protect the longevity of the farm by recording successes and areas of improvement throughout the season for stakeholders. Farmers feel that software for the small scale farmer is lacking, and our team received much interest from small scale farmers for tech innovations to address their management challenges.
"To help me manage when things feel unmanageable... [FarmHand] could be a game changer"
-Farmer, MA
FarmHand serves as a centralized application to help farms function internally. Unexplored in this case overview is the ability of FarmHand's collaborative capacity as a stepping stone to allow farmers to partner with other farms in the area.
Majority of our survey respondents sell in Eastern MA, growing in the area in suburbs or rural locations. Massachusetts has a robust network of small-scale farms and high customer interest and retention for Community Supported Agriculture (aka CSA) programs. This farming model we focused on does not necessarily reflect farmers needs across the nation. However, with the pandemic creating high demand for locally sourced food and CSA shares, we believe FarmHand could be an instrumental tool for farms in the future.
FarmHand is designed with the small farmer in mind, to make their lives easier by strengthening connections with their existing customers. For this project, we put our farmers first, designing tools to to help farms refine their standard operating procedures around inventory management systems and sales.
With FarmHand by their side, farmers can do more of what they know and love in the fields, without losing precious daylight to hands-on inventory management, sales, and record keeping.
Growing, processing and distributing a perishable product requires detailed oversight.
In the height of the season, farmers need every minute in the fields. With few tools working for farmers to automate systems to help manage inventory, sales, and record keeping during the height of their season, many farmers are forced into overdrive, exhausting themselves by the end of the season.
FarmHand helps to manage a farms inventory logistics and communication with their existing client base through passive technology. Seamlessly, FarmHands organization and management tools to integrate into the standard operating procedures of small farms.
As a former farmer, I wanted to build a product designed for farmers, not just their customers. I wanted a product that could help small scale farmers in their formative years to organize their processes and, overall, improve their lives of farmers by lightening their loads.
This was a six week project completed in the fall of 2020. I pitched the project idea and was lucky enough to have two colleagues interested in collaborating with me. My personal experience farming along with conversations with other farmers guided my initial pitch. I was humbled to share this project with talented individuals who did not have any farming background, and with whom we could generate ideas. The perspectives and specialties of my teammates Denis and CJ were invaluable during this design process.
Small scale farmers wear many hats, though most farmers derive value and meaning from the act of growing and harvesting in the fields. Dealing with inventory management, sales, and administrative tasks is inevitably part of the job, and can be fulfilling, but how might we make these tasks easier for farmers?
To test the assumptions I formed from my personal experience farming, our team wanted to gather more information on what issues farmers face beyond growing and cultivation, and how we might be able to help.
Understand existing sign up experiences, customer needs, business limitations
Generate concepts for solutions, share and receive feedback, revise
How might UserTesting optimize the existing sign up patterns?
How would the applied patterns add value to the current sign up experience?
Iterate designs based on research and various forms of feedback
Despite making up a significant and growing portion of customers, a dedicated body of research on UserTesting’s non-traditional users did not exist. Working with the Customer Marketing team, these insights were collected from a comprehensive onboarding survey.
Onboarding satisfaction with UserTesting varies according to customer role.
The lower levels of satisfaction rates amongst new, non-traditional users is reflected in low product engagement.
Customers rated PENDO messages as highly important for onboarding and product understanding.
This finding suggests that guidance which occurs on the platform would be useful for UserTesting’s customers.
Engagement with UserTesting's product varies by account type and customer role.
Platform engagement is lower for non traditional customers, compared to UserTesting's traditional customers.
These insights present an opportunity for UserTesting to target onboarding content for new users in non-traditional roles and to raise awareness of UserTesting's other customer touchpoints.
As UserTesting’s content sharing experience becomes more collaborative, consumable, and supportive of a product adoption strategy that is used across a company —in all different departments— we want non expert users, to be able to not only witness how UserTesting's product powerfully conveys human insight through test results, but also provide customers with a frictionless experience to signup get started using the platform.
During our market research phase, we found a comprehensive resource created by the National Young Farmers Coalition, listing available sales platforms for farms. However, none of our research participants had used—with most never having heard of—any of the sales platforms listed. We examined the 19 listed software platforms and 5 additional platforms we found along the way.
Existing farm software...
Users trying to sign up for UserTesting through the company's main marketing page might be confused how exactly to sign up. The experience does not present an opportunity for a new user to sign up for UserTesting without having to request a trial or speak to a representative.
Signing up for UserTesitng requires new users to request trial. Clicking the request trial button brings users to a plans and pricing page without any information on how much the product costs, or further information about how the UserTesting's product will help users reach their test objectives. Similar to the homepage, on these pages, it is unclear what the difference between "Request Trial," "Order Now," and signing up is.
Keeping in mind how we can design a product truly for farmers required us to strongly consider how our product would integrate seamlessly into the lives and procedures of farmers today. Our research led to the development of a mobile app to improve farm inventory management by converting crop spreadsheets into predicted yields and harvest dates that are shared with existing customers through an accessible, self-regulating interface.
Our research suggested farmers struggle equally with employee management and inventory management. By getting information out of farmers’ heads and consolidated and integrated in a mobile application, Our application can serve as an integrated hub for managers to communicate with their employees. With more insight into product sales, farm employees can gain professional development through a better understanding of the business side of farms.
In addition to helping to manage inventory, with streamlined data collection farm stakeholders can gain a clearer picture of sales throughout the season to help drive decision making for next season. These metrics provide insight into the bigger picture for all of roles within small-scale farms.
Finally, automated crop availability and an integrated sales platform aids in communication with customers for availability, delivery, invoices, and more.
What or how much personal information should users give at the time of sign up?
What are the risks associated with the flows?
What are strategies to bring realized value forward sooner in the sign up flow?
Discussions with sales, customer onboarding, template operations, security, and more.
The new sign up designs consider the first time user experience. They work to make the first time a user touches the product a more intuitive process by considering how to create ease of use within UserTesting's product for people outside of UX professionals. This sign up experience can be applied across different entry points and considers what happens after new users are signed up, and how to encourage customer retention.
Quickly and early on, customers are shown the value they receive by signing up for UserTesting — they can quickly get feedback on their product, concept, branding, etc.
Throughout the sign up experience, UserTesting demonstrates personally resonating value propositions based on test objectives, job type, and more.
UserTesting highlights product value—the platform does not only help customer create, record, and analyze tests, but also provides a network of contributors, or participants ready to take tests and give actionable feedback.
Product offerings and potential are shown softly throughout the sign up flow. Tooltips help customers new-to-research navigate terminology, research strategies, and to identify methods to best fit their feedback needs.
Customers are guided through the product through contextual onboarding, maximum context through blog post links, and a product tour after signing up and landing on the test creation dashboard.
Throughout the sign up experience, messaging is personalized relevant to a customer's job function. The information gathered during the sign up experience is used to better serve UserTesting's customers in their first test creation.
Customer's test creation is expedited by personalizing the landing page so that templates and settings are already organized to meet users specific needs.
This personalization allows users to complete tasks and orient themselves fluidly, quicker and more confidently after they land on the test creation dashboard.
Lightweight copy, concise context, and conversational tone adds levity to the sign up experience.
A human insights platform, sprinkled with personal touches throughout to drive home the importance of practiced human connection and empathy.
Connect new users to existing accounts, share feedback results, effectively collaborate to translate findings into actionable insights.
UserTesting's experiences scale seamlessly from teams of one to large enterprise organizations, new users, and those who have been using the product from the start.
FarmHand is a tool that helps small-scale farmers with inventory management throughout the season and to plan for future seasons. Inventory and sales management and data collection helps to protect the longevity of the farm by recording successes and areas of improvement throughout the season for stakeholders. Farmers feel that software for the small scale farmer is lacking, and our team received much interest from small scale farmers for tech innovations to address their management challenges.
"To help me manage when things feel unmanageable... [FarmHand] could be a game changer"
-Farmer, MA
FarmHand serves as a centralized application to help farms function internally. Unexplored in this case overview is the ability of FarmHand's collaborative capacity as a stepping stone to allow farmers to partner with other farms in the area.
Majority of our survey respondents sell in Eastern MA, growing in the area in suburbs or rural locations. Massachusetts has a robust network of small-scale farms and high customer interest and retention for Community Supported Agriculture (aka CSA) programs. This farming model we focused on does not necessarily reflect farmers needs across the nation. However, with the pandemic creating high demand for locally sourced food and CSA shares, we believe FarmHand could be an instrumental tool for farms in the future.
FarmHand is designed with the small farmer in mind, to make their lives easier by strengthening connections with their existing customers. For this project, we put our farmers first, designing tools to to help farms refine their standard operating procedures around inventory management systems and sales.
With FarmHand by their side, farmers can do more of what they know and love in the fields, without losing precious daylight to hands-on inventory management, sales, and record keeping.
Growing, processing and distributing a perishable product requires detailed oversight.
In the height of the season, farmers need every minute in the fields. With few tools working for farmers to automate systems to help manage inventory, sales, and record keeping during the height of their season, many farmers are forced into overdrive, exhausting themselves by the end of the season.
FarmHand helps to manage a farms inventory logistics and communication with their existing client base through passive technology. Seamlessly, FarmHands organization and management tools to integrate into the standard operating procedures of small farms.
As a former farmer, I wanted to build a product designed for farmers, not just their customers. I wanted a product that could help small scale farmers in their formative years to organize their processes and, overall, improve their lives of farmers by lightening their loads.
This was a six week project completed in the fall of 2020. I pitched the project idea and was lucky enough to have two colleagues interested in collaborating with me. My personal experience farming along with conversations with other farmers guided my initial pitch. I was humbled to share this project with talented individuals who did not have any farming background, and with whom we could generate ideas. The perspectives and specialties of my teammates Denis and CJ were invaluable during this design process.
Small scale farmers wear many hats, though most farmers derive value and meaning from the act of growing and harvesting in the fields. Dealing with inventory management, sales, and administrative tasks is inevitably part of the job, and can be fulfilling, but how might we make these tasks easier for farmers?
"It is extremely difficult to get accepted into the tests"
"Are UserTesting screeners a trick or am I missing something?"
"They give you all these tests, but then when you start applying for them, you just get denied"
“The biggest challenge...is people bypassing screeners who are not qualified”
“Writing a screener that contributors can't 'trick' is challenging”
“Finding the right people is the biggest challenge, sometimes participants lie to bypass screeners or information is outdated”
With more screener questions, it becomes more difficult for contributors to qualify for, and takes dedicated but unpaid time. This process impacts how long it takes customers to receive their feedback.
To test the assumptions I formed from my personal experience farming, our team wanted to gather more information on what issues farmers face beyond growing and cultivation, and how we might be able to help.
How might we improve the way that customers select demographics so they can more easily refine their choices?
How might we reduce the number of screeners by encouraging customers to use demographic filters?
How might we improve the way contributors input new demographics and update their existing demographics?
Much of the problem could be understood with a walk through of the audience selector flow for customers. Shown here is how UserTesting's demographic filters are presented on the customer facing audience selector side.
Customers can select test participants through UserTesting's contributor network, or through a company's specified participants-- either solicited through their own network, or through the contributor network.
Gender exclusivity and inaccessibility through the use of directional language --"select filters on the right"-- is immediately apparent in the filter selection experience. The list order of items does not present an intuitive selection experience for customers, and there is no guidance on when to use screener questions versus filters.
Additional understanding of the problem area was gained through customer insights, demographics usage metrics, and the many contributor pain points expressed to UserTesting's support network, and found recorded independently online via Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, discussion boards, etc.
To test some of our assumptions and to gain more perspectives, we sent a survey to the Eastern Massachusetts Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training and U.S. Farmers Market Coalition members. Over 24 hours we received 34 responses and heavy interest in participating in 1:1 interviews. Majority of respondents were growing for customers in Eastern Massachusetts.
“Communication is challenging because we are contacted from so many different means - we get phone calls, emails, messages through our website, messages, through Google, and messages from sources that I didn’t even know existed. We have to stay on top of all those avenues to avoid disappointing a customer or potential customer.”
— Farm Manager, MA
“I rarely want to talk to customers unless I am at a farmers market, which I rarely do. But I have weekly messages that I have to send out, and follow up emails with invoices. I’d like to automate all that.”
— Farm Owner, RI
“If I had time during the season to manage my spreadsheet that would be helpful. For now it is managed ‘in my head’”
— Farm Manger, MA
“I have been unable to make [farming] not fully life-consuming.”
— Farm Owner, NC
Increase customers use of demographics over screeners that may serve the same purpose
Make the current demographics that UserTesting offers more accessible and easier to use
UserTesting would be able to know how "fresh" the contributor's information is
Customers can target the right contributors more efficiently and with better accuracy
Customers can rely more readily on demographics to help them target the right individuals
During our market research phase, we found a comprehensive resource created by the National Young Farmers Coalition, listing available sales platforms for farms. However, none of our research participants had used—with most never having heard of—any of the sales platforms listed. We examined the 19 listed software platforms and 5 additional platforms we found along the way.
Existing farm software...
Keeping in mind how we can design a product truly for farmers required us to strongly consider how our product would integrate seamlessly into the lives and procedures of farmers today. Our research led to the development of a mobile app to improve farm inventory management by converting crop spreadsheets into predicted yields and harvest dates that are shared with existing customers through an accessible, self-regulating interface.
Our research suggested farmers struggle equally with employee management and inventory management. By getting information out of farmers’ heads and consolidated and integrated in a mobile application, Our application can serve as an integrated hub for managers to communicate with their employees. With more insight into product sales, farm employees can gain professional development through a better understanding of the business side of farms.
In addition to helping to manage inventory, with streamlined data collection farm stakeholders can gain a clearer picture of sales throughout the season to help drive decision making for next season. These metrics provide insight into the bigger picture for all of roles within small-scale farms.
Finally, automated crop availability and an integrated sales platform aids in communication with customers for availability, delivery, invoices, and more.
How might we improve the audience selector experience while maintaining customer expectations?
How do we encourage users to use filters over screeners that serve the same purpose?
How might we ensure customers that filters are as accurate as screener questions?
How might we improve the current profile view to better support growth?
How can we make this experience enjoyable in general?
How can we manage the amount of information we ask from contributors?
The initial profile set up flow aims to onboard new contributor applicants. This flow allows contributors to fill out ‘necessary’ or essential profile information when they sign up, but withholds asking applicants to fill out extraneous information until they’re approved.
When contributors have fully joined after approval, they can add in more detailed information and some optional information. Sharing the optional information allows contributors to more quickly qualify for tests, without having to answer screener questions.
Splitting the profile info up into sections helps make it more manageable, browsable, and allows flexibility in what contributors provide. Progress in both the overall profile and the sections helps encourage completion by making the task feel achievable.
Questions appear dynamically based on previous answers.
The edit flow demonstrates reminders for contributors to update their profile information. This ensures their profile information is up to date and accurate since this was a concern of customers regarding use of filters versus screeners.
Prior, changes made to demographics required contributors to go through UserTesting's support channels, causing higher volumes of requests for the support team. This flow introduces certain fields as locked -- to only be updated once every however long before requiring support.
For the customer's experience with the audience builder, we improved features of the experience rather than the whole flow of audience selection.
Here we see categorized filters and the addition, removal, and renaming of necessary filters. We introduced default and saved filters under filter presets to make it easier for customers to re-use their existing go-to-filters.
Most used filters by account will be automatically displayed to encourage customers to use filters over screener questions that serve the same purpose.
With this feature, customers can easily do a quick-search to find demographic filters.
UserTesting's intelligent search features allow customers to search for filters such as "student" and be guided toward its directed category under "Employment status" as a "Full Time Student."
The search feature reduces frustration customers spend finding their desired filters, and opting to use screener questions instead.
While customers are creating screener questions, we added more friction to reduce the number of screener questions, suggesting the use of appropriate filters instead.
Because UserTesting's contributors experience first hand how difficult it can be to qualify for tests, solving for the contributor facing designs, and "selling" the designs to contributor testers was straightforward. Contributors were enthusiastically on board with the idea of maintaining up to date profile information, if it meant less screener questions to go through.
When designing for the customer facing experience, our main consideration was how manage existing audience selector expectations from UserTesting's seasoned customers. For this reason, our team kept many of the expectations from the audience selector experience, with filters on the lefthand panel, the audience selector body on the right, and the expanded filters.
If a test takes longer than expected to be completed, the reason for the delay is not inherently obvious to customers. Users may think there aren't enough contributors online, or that there is an issue with the test, or with the platform, and so on. Because these backstage contributor facing processes are concealed, the delays that screener questions cause is relatively hidden from the concerns of customers.
For this reason, the question remains for which method best communicates with customers the benefit of filters over screeners to customers, and how to not discourage screeners as a whole, but a screener that serves the same purpose as a filtered demographic question. These insights were noted in the design files.
FarmHand is designed with the small farmer in mind, to make their lives easier by strengthening connections with their existing customers. For this project, we put our farmers first, designing tools to to help farms refine their standard operating procedures around inventory management systems and sales.
With FarmHand by their side, farmers can do more of what they know and love in the fields, without losing precious daylight to hands-on inventory management, sales, and record keeping.
Growing, processing and distributing a perishable product requires detailed oversight.
In the height of the season, farmers need every minute in the fields. With few tools working for farmers to automate systems to help manage inventory, sales, and record keeping during the height of their season, many farmers are forced into overdrive, exhausting themselves by the end of the season.
FarmHand helps to manage a farms inventory logistics and communication with their existing client base through passive technology. Seamlessly, FarmHands organization and management tools to integrate into the standard operating procedures of small farms.
To test the assumptions I formed from my personal experience farming, our team wanted to gather more information on what issues farmers face beyond growing and cultivation, and how we might be able to help.
Keeping in mind how we can design a product truly for farmers required us to strongly consider how our product would integrate seamlessly into the lives and procedures of farmers today. Our research led to the development of a mobile app to improve farm inventory management by converting crop spreadsheets into predicted yields and harvest dates that are shared with existing customers through an accessible, self-regulating interface.
Our research suggested farmers struggle equally with employee management and inventory management. By getting information out of farmers’ heads and consolidated and integrated in a mobile application, Our application can serve as an integrated hub for managers to communicate with their employees. With more insight into product sales, farm employees can gain professional development through a better understanding of the business side of farms.
In addition to helping to manage inventory, with streamlined data collection farm stakeholders can gain a clearer picture of sales throughout the season to help drive decision making for next season. These metrics provide insight into the bigger picture for all of roles within small-scale farms.
Finally, automated crop availability and an integrated sales platform aids in communication with customers for availability, delivery, invoices, and more.
Our team's product goals focused on creating an integrated application that would include tools for task delegation to employees, communication with stakeholders, and easily understandable and customizable analytics. We sought to understand how on-farm operating systems currently function. Our solution utilizes and builds on these existing systems. FarmHand stacks the functions of existing crop planning spreadsheets beyond their on-farm functions. Through a single platform, farmers can utilize their crop planning spreadsheets to communicate crop availability to customers. Finally, at the end of the season, farmers can easily export the season's data with accurate harvest yields and sales to help plan for the next growing season!
FarmHand is a tool that helps small-scale farmers with inventory management throughout the season and to plan for future seasons. Inventory and sales management and data collection helps to protect the longevity of the farm by recording successes and areas of improvement throughout the season for stakeholders. Farmers feel that software for the small scale farmer is lacking, and our team received much interest from small scale farmers for tech innovations to address their management challenges.
"To help me manage when things feel unmanageable... [FarmHand] could be a game changer"
-Farmer, MA
FarmHand serves as a centralized application to help farms function internally. Unexplored in this case overview is the ability of FarmHand's collaborative capacity as a stepping stone to allow farmers to partner with other farms in the area.
Majority of our survey respondents sell in Eastern MA, growing in the area in suburbs or rural locations. Massachusetts has a robust network of small-scale farms and high customer interest and retention for Community Supported Agriculture (aka CSA) programs. This farming model we focused on does not necessarily reflect farmers needs across the nation. However, with the pandemic creating high demand for locally sourced food and CSA shares, we believe FarmHand could be an instrumental tool for farms in the future.
