About64% of our farming population in Taiwan is above the age of 50, and these people tend to be less tech-savvy. Secondary research suggests that most farmers are frustrated about not selling their products during the pandemic.
The design of TheSunshine Market is to provide a platform where farmers could sell their crops online while customers could have a well-structured, easy-to-navigate shopping experience.
I’m my own army from the beginning to the end! Wearing multiple hats including UX research, UX Design, and UI Design. Responsibilities include UX research, empathizing with users, paper & digital wireframing, lo-fi & hi-fi prototyping, and usability studies.
In the post-pandemic world, we are forced to change our ways of dealing with many things. For farmers, their access to traditional in-person marketplaces is limited, and need another way to find potential buyers and sell their products. For customers, current online farmers market platforms are not well-established, hard to navigate, and less-attractive compared to other e-commerce platforms.
To design an app that is well-structured and easy to use to help farmers connect with potential buyers online. This could bring new possibilities to Taiwan’s agriculture Production marketing model.
To fully understand the current scope of the market, I compare the shopping experience within each competitor base on several criteria:
Most online farmers market platforms in Taiwan have poorly-organized user flow & weak information architecture. These are the opportunities I could use when designing this new product.
Farmers would love to find a way to sell their products during the pandemic if they have access to easy-to-use tools to help them.
Online farmers market platforms should improve their user flow.
During the ideation phase, I used the “Crazy 8's method” to try out different possibilities.
Since the problem is pretty clear at this point, the first thing I want to resolve is the messy information architecture problem that most platforms have. Here’s what I want to do: I want to create a home page that users would know what to do once seeing it. Most competitors put their market sections and their brand stories on the same level of the hierarchy, which is messy, so I separate them.
Paper wireframe:
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After building the lo-fi prototype, I threw an unmoderated usability test with a survey. Participants were recruited through different forums on the internet.
Insights from the survey:
1. Home Icon Requested - Users are expecting there to be a home icon on the market page.
2. Adjust Quantity on Point - There should be an option to adjust quantity whenever there’s a “add to cart” button.
This is the part when things start to get alive! I made some adjustments according to the findings of the usability study:
1. Added home icon
2. Added quantity adjustment
3. Some people reported that the exclamation point makes them think there was something wrong with the cart, so I changed it into numbers.
4. “+” icon was moved to the right side (more intuitive for right-handed users)
Farmers want to let customers know who they are and what they do. Customers want to know more about the farmers near their location and buy products from them. This platform not only makes this connection possible but also provides a clear & easy-to-use shopping experience.