Gramophone: Empowering Farmers Through Technology

In the mid 2017, i got an opportunity to work with Gramophone Team, who already were selling agriculture supplies to farmers like pesticides, tools, seeds etc through offline channels. They wanted to build an app that can help farmers in being more connected with technology, with on-tap order and delivery of all kinds of agriculture supply.

Gramophone was at the initiation stage and i had an opportunity to work directly with the CEO, CTO along with developers, sales team and end-users and helped them build a product that is now helping to shape the future of Agriculture industry in India.

Project Overview

Designed the app from scratch along with a fellow UX/UI designer

• Launched the beta in 3 months
• Evolved the app to increase app usage time & build trust through continuous user testing and iteration
• Worked with Gramophone for 2 years (2017 - 2019)

My Responsibility

• User Research (Qualitative)
• Discussion with Stakeholders
• UI Design + Iteration
• Co-ordination with the development team (Android)
• Usability Testing
• Visual Design for Marketing & Sales

Achivements

Impacted 2.5 Lakh FarmersSecured $1 Mn Pre Series A Funding as of 2019

In the News

Gramophone: Farm doctors at your service - Forbes >

Agri-tech startup Gramophone raises 24Cr from InfoEdge >

The Problem

Indian Farmers are not aware of the technological advancements, government policies that has improved over time, thus losing out on a huge opportunity of growing, maintaining and improving the crops. We wanted to bridge this gap by building an app that can help farmers in education of how to take care of their crops and building more awareness of the untapped opportunities.

Discovery

I started off by gather more understanding of the business we wanted to build, farmers, agriculture business, their pain points, lifestyle, expectations etc. Gramophone was already selling Agriculture supplies to farmers in Indore offline on the ground, hence i got a great opportunity to learn from the sales teams as-well on the behaviour of farmers.After agile interviews and discussions we found various challenges that farmers are facing, understood their psychology, their fear, motivations and many other insights that helped us to define who we are designing for.

Challenges faced by the farmers

• Don't understand much English and prefer regional languageMost of the people don't know english, and a few that do have a very basic understanding.
• Digital payments are TabooMajority of Farmers don't use Internet Banking, don't have a signature visit banks to get their passbooks updated.
• Scared that technology will take their jobsMany feel and lost jobs due to advancing technology and see the emerging tech as a disadvantage to their income
• Not educated enoughAlthough they understand agriculture the best, but don't know how far we've come and how technology can help them fix their problems in a much shorter span.
• Modern design feels expensiveSleek and modern design makes them feel the brand or item is expensive and they can get a cheaper solution. 

Motivations of the farmers

• Trust's Panchayat and respect their decisionEvery village has a Panchayat, most of them trust's panchayat's decisions and believe that its for their welfare.
• They are followersVillages are small communities, where everyone knows everyone and they see all of them as one family. There is monopoly and if one people see the benefits other people will adopt quicly.
• Don't mind spending, if they can see valueFarmers work very hard to make money and understand the value of money, they would not spend on lifestyle but will spend happily if it's about the welfare of their crops.
• Regularly use Apps like WhatsApp and FacebookMost of them use Whatsapp and Facebook on a daily basic for their entertainment and few for educational purpose.
• Govt. schemes their supportEverybody believes in the government, because most of them are still struggling, govt. schemes are their only support and they take it very seriously.

Defining Personas

We mapped the findings and defined the core persona's that captures all the kinds of people who will be our end users. Every design and business decision was based on these three persona's.

The Process

While doing design sprints and user testing, we ended up redefining the goals, but we planned to launch the solution of the initial problems (simplified eCommerce and utility tools) in the beta release and parallelly started to envision the future of the app.

This time we wanted to build a more engaging and helpful utility app for farmers instead of a simplified eCommerce

We started to relook the users pain points and motivations with a different lens as we had different questions this time, and those were:

How can we make the App more engaging and give more value

How can we build trust and credibility

After couple of design-sprints we concluded the following add-ons to the app that will help in getting more engagement from the farmers and build more trust and brand value. We even had to change some flows in the beta release in order to accommodate the future changes.

Ideas that made farmers Love Gramophone

Regional Language support

We launched the App with Hindi and English language, all the graphic assets we designed and Hindi first. Later on we added more regional languages as we scaled up.

A familiar and trusted design language

Our design inspiration came from Indian flag and already trusted institutions by the farmers, government institutions, banks and national brands, likes of SBI, PNB, Amul, PSM, Nirma, Tide etc.

Simple and already know flow

We designed the app flow using the set patterns used by WhatsApp and Facebook. Users were already educated about this flow and it helped us getting instant acceptance and better usability.

Book on Call, Pay on Delivery

Buy now buttons calls gramophone agri experts and farmers get proper consultation.

Educating them on Ground-level

Sales team went and spoke with panchayat and educated farmers about gramophone, ran Loudspeaker recordings in villages and workshops.

Intelligent tools and Expert guidance at fingertips

Farmers don't know what is the right solution. We added most needed tools in the App, like Weather Report, Mandi Prices that help them in making better decisions. In every call our Agri experts understand the farmers pain-points and guide them towards the best possible solution. 

One-Stop-Feed for Agri News and Schemes

We build an Agriculture-only News feed, that tells farmers about all the latest technology, schemes, offers. They just have to come to gramophone to learn about everything going around them in Agriculture industry.

A community of Farmers

We built a community where farmers and talk to other farmers and help each other, it's also monitored by our Agri experts and we help them in any way possible.

My Learnings

The biggest challenge i faced was while working the Android dev team, creating all the assets required for agile development from multiple device sizes and understanding the different formats required for Android dev. Learnt how JPEG, SVG, PNG are different from hdpi, mdpi xdpi, xxdpi.

There was always a time crunch due to short deadlines in the Agile design and development process, and understood that prioritising the design also requires developers involvement and it's crucial that all the decisions are made collaboratively. 

"Sometimes we have to sacrifice some important features due to long development cycle, but it's important to not miss any crucial feature that is essential to usability. Because we are not making Minimum Viable Product, we are making Minimum Usable Product."

People who I am thankful to

I am very proud that i got an opportunity to work with Gramophone and i thank Mr. Ashish Ranjan (CTO) and Mr. Tausif Khan, (CEO & Cofounder) for their constant guidance and support.I also would thank to my fellow designer Rohit Pal, who helped me at every-step, Mr. Praveen, my farmer friend for a lot of insights and all other farmers, sales-reps, dev team and friends who helped me during this project. Without them i would never be able to find the solutions or understand the real problem.