Project New Village is a community-run garden formed to combat Southeast San Diego’s food insecurityby providing access to healthier food. They offer their community members a place to grow their ownfood and/or sell their home-grown crops at a local farmer’s market.
ROLE
UX/UI designer
Partner liaison
Team leader
TIMELINE
7 weeks
02. User Research
Stakeholders
Diane’s duties include all legal and financial actions such as:
Bidding for vacant lots for new gardens
Petitioning for grants
Selling crops at a local food market
Leo
Head (and only) farmer
Leo visits about twice a week for a couple of hours to maintain all crops owned by the organization, and he additionally helps with community members’ crops if problems arise.
Members / Volunteers
Volunteers maintain crops grown by the organization itself. They harvest and sell produce at farmers markets, contributing to the success and growth of Project New Village.
Findings
Through a preliminary interview, we were able to recognize some key problems that hindered their overall goal of being able to share their fresh produce with the whole community. We noticed that Leo was spread out really thin, especially since he only came into the farm about twice a week. Although the community members were dedicated, their limited knowledge about the various farming methods was an inconvenience. Additionally, although they really wanted to reach out to the community, their actual outreach was relatively weak due tot heir social media not being as active as it should be. Finally, through an observation of a school program working in the garden, we were able to understand the full extent of which this organization reaches out to the community and help it come together.
03. Problem Definition + Ideation
Problem Statement
Community members of Project New Village need a way to quickly access information such as farming techniques and crop yield, a better organization system of their gardens, and help from experts in order to expand local food sources within the community.
Ideation
Below is our affinity diagram. My team and I generated ideas and grouped them accordingly intro three broad categories: functionality, knowledge, and outreach.
Why a Mobile App?
Since gardening is an outdoors activity, we decided that a mobile app will be easier to use for gardeners. Although we wanted to increase accessibility for users, we also realized that the lower income users may not have access to a smartphone. We would ideally want to implement this as a web app for access on smartphones as well as computers.
04. Low-fidelity Wireframes
We created wireframes based on the three categories that emerged from our affinity diagram.
Wireframe #1 - Build Your Own Garden
Wireframe #2 - Forum
A forum will ease communication between the outside community, garden community members, and certified farmers by being able to ask each other questions and get help at any given time.
Ideally, the response time would be quicker than waiting for someone like Leo who can’t always be presentat the garden.
Finally, they would be able to get answers from their own community and would additionally be ableto share things with each other, such as pictures and achievements.
Wireframe #3 - Administration Plot Tracker
This prototype will be able to keep track of each plot owner by quickly and easily adding each respective owner’s information. This would help Diane with her yearly reports by keeping track of the community members, how many of them are coming in, how many own plots, and such logistics.
05. User Testing
To evaluate each of the concepts above, we conducted two rounds of prototype testing. Our first round included 5 different groups of participants: students, managers, and novice gardeners. The most recurring feedback were:
The buttons needed to be more clear
The forum was too cluttered and needed to be organized
Overall objectives of each prototype were clear and to the point
Our second round of testing was done with our main stakeholders of Project New Village. The main takeaway was that they found all three prototypes useful, but that they weren’t sure as to which one would be the most beneficial.
Developing a Final Concept
Since we were unable to test which prototype would serve our stakeholders best due to time constraints, we decided to create a criteria table instead. These are based on the feedback received and our initial research and they include:
Accessibility: is it accessible and shareable by most of the community?
Flexibility: does it allow for various user input, customization, or personalization?
Results/Information: does it give the gardeners the information they need regarding yield and growing methods?
Connectivity: does it connect the community together?
User interface: is it easy to navigate and use? Is the application appealing?
We then weighed the pros and cons of each prototype against the chosen criteria in a decision matrix. The weight of each criteria was chosen in accordance to what we found was most important to our stakeholders. Build your own garden and the forum had the highest total while the administration was in the negatives.
