Empowering farmers through market transparency.
Plantix is an app that helps farmers diagnose and treat crop problems, improve productivity and provides farming knowledge.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted confidential information in this case study, including specific numbers.
One of our core values at Plantix is to “enable better decisions”. We do this by giving farmers free access to relevant, reliable and unbiased information. As impactful as this is, we quickly realised that information without action is useless when dealing with crop diseases, which is why we decided to complement our disease diagnosis feature with a service that connects farmers in need of a particular product with nearby retailers that can fulfill that need. (Currently live in India)
One of the key challenges was to communicate to farmers how this service would benefit them. As with any first to market solution, a clear value proposition was key to our success.
My role included researching direct and indirect competitors, visual explorations, illustrations, information architecture, user flows, layout design, copywriting, feedback rounds, prototyping, validation, final mockups, and dev-handoff.
Plantix users are people that dedicate their lives to agriculture. For them, farming is not a job, it's a lifestyle. Unlike 9-5 jobs that allow you to have some free time before and after work, farmers spend most of their lives taking care of their crops.
During our research phase, we found out that 50% of the products a farmer purchases are unnecessary, which means they lose up to 30% of their income.
One of the biggest pain points during treatment discovery* was the amount of time it would take for farmers to find the right product at a fair price due to the lack of market transparency in the agri sector in India. On average, once we provided treatment options to our users, it would take them between 24-72 hrs to find the products, which meant having to choose between spending full days on travel and negotiation with different retailers, or tending to their crops to prevent any damage from spreading further.
*treatment discovery is how we define the time a farmer spends searching for the product we recommended to treat their crop disease.
We challenged the status quo and put farmers in a position of power by giving them choices.
With the help of users of our second venture (Plantix Partner) we created an online retailer network with more than 10.000 stores, giving farmers the ability to understand what kind of product they need as well as where and how to get it. Farmers can now choose the most suitable solution for their needs.