Revolution Agriculture
UX - Responsive Website
How might we educate people about sustainable farming and get them to sign up to host a farmlet?
Problem
Revolution Agriculture wants to improve bounce rate, streamline path to conversion and flatten the UX process in order to get more people signing up to be farmlet hosts.
Solution
Redesign the website to be more informative and engaging by focus the attention on the farmlets in order to drive more people to host a farmlet on their land and give back to the community.
Project Overview
Timeframe: 4 weeks
Team: Marco Vertucci, Marisa Katagiri, Shannon Finn, Jaden Johnson
Role: UX Designer, Product designer
Deliverables: Research Report, Information Architecture, Annotated wireframes and clickable prototypes
Tools: Sketch, Figma, Invision
RESEARCH
Understanding the challenge
Revolution Agriculture is a platform that enables the production of fresh produce within 10 miles of consumers through micro-sized farms the size of a parking spot called farmlets. Traditional farms are struggling, and on average the distance from farm to table is 4000 miles. Farmlets can be the solution to that.
The idea immediately intrigued me, and I was ready to help this startup accomplish its goal of hyper-local, fresh produce at affordable prices by revamping their website to get people as excited about the farmlets and encourage them to host their very own.
Understanding the market
I started by conducting some initial research to get a better understanding of the problem space. When researching the domain of vertical farming we found that Revolution Agriculture is in a great position to capitalize on the shift in the agricultural marketplace.
The global vertical farming market size is projected to reach $12.77 billion by 2026
Consumers are willing to pay more for products that align with their values
Homeowners want to utilize unused property to generate passive income
Consumers are moving towards more sustainable products and practices
Competitive Analysis
Revolution Agriculture’s main competition comes from places like Imperfect Foods, Plenty, AeroFarms, Freight Farms whose themes also revolve around hyper-local sustainable alternative farming methods. However, Revolution Agriculture’s competitive advantage over them and what sets them apart is:
Farmlets are incredibly mobile and flexible. They can yield over 11,000 pounds of natural produce from the size of a parking space
Hosts are able to earn passive income just by hosting the farmlets
Farmlets are able to grow anything anywhere, not just leafy greens and fruits
User Interviews
In order to get a deeper understanding of what the Revolution Agriculture’s users are looking for, we conducted user interviews with 6 users and 2 Subject Matter Experts.
Everyone identified at least one barrier to hosting, with ⅓ identifying 2 or more
Users want to know what they are signing up for before committing
Passive income and sustainability are major reasons for people to want to host farmlet
SYNTHESIS
Journey Map
We started our synthesis process by doing a customer scenario map exercise for the current website with our client in order to understand the user’s current experience. Involving our client early on in the design process allowed us to align our goals and define the scope of our project.
The main takeaways were that overall users are intrigued and curious about the process of hosting a farmlet, albeit a bit skeptical about if and how it works.
The User
Our target users are private land owners that are local and sustainability oriented and are looking to receive passive income by renting out their land.
Our client provided us with 3 personas (hosts, employees, and customers), but we decided that it would be most effective to scope down and focus primarily on farmlet hosts to meet our goals, leaving the rest for later on when we will have a network of hosts and distribution in place.
Design Principles
Demonstrate Transparency
Users should have a clear idea of what the farmlet is and the expected commitment.
Guarantee quality
Users should know they’re getting the freshest produce and where it comes from.
Be unique
Users should be curious by the possibilities of any produce, anywhere, any season.
Problem Statement
Visitors to Revolution Agriculture’s website need information that motivates them to sign up as hosts, because farmlets generate passive income and support communities.
IDEATION
WireFlow
In order to visualize how users would go through the process of signing up and decide on the structure of the website I created the information architecture for the website.
When thinking about our main flow of hosting a farmlet, we recognized there would be multiple entry points to make sure it is discoverable. Once the signup is complete they will have the option to sign up for further news about the upcoming produce delivery.
Divergent Concepts and User Feedback
Armed with the results from our research and interviews, we started ideating different ways we could redesign the pages so that it would encourage users to sign up as hosts.
We conducted usability testing with 8 users on a series of different low fidelity prototypes as well as a dot voting workshop with our client. This was an extremely important step that allowed us to start confidently converging towards our final design because we were able to relate his votes and feedback back to our user data.
DESIGN
Converged Design
For our final round of interviews we conducted a usability test with seven participants performing four different tasks. After continuously iterating on the wireframes and taking in consideration the feedback we received, we finally arrived at a solution. Below are our main takeaways from our testing and how we incorporated them into our final design.
Mobile Prototypes
Currently the website is not optimized for mobile. Since a majority of the target demographic does most of their browsing through their mobile device, It seemed like a responsive website would be the best and most cost efficient way to capture those customers.
EVALUATE
Next Steps
The next step would be to elevate fidelity of desktop and mobile wireframes to high-level with colors and full copy, followed by more usability testing.
We conducted a Visual Competitive analysis of the main competitors and came up with a few suggestions for the UI team in terms of color, typography, buttons, as well as the look and imagery to consider for the updated website.
Reflections
From this project, I learned how to work effectively with our client to make sure the business needs were met as well as the user needs. I was able to present design decisions in weekly meetings with our client, and I was able to leverage my prior experience working on checkout flows to lead the redesign of the sign up page after some not so promising usability results to dramatically improve the experience.
I was lucky because the client was really involved and excited about the outcome of our projects, and was pleased with our designs. I really enjoyed working on the project and I cannot wait to see our design implemented so we can measure the success of our design.