TipShare
This was an exploratory research project that I worked on at Georgia Tech with a group of 3 other students. The central focus of this project was developing a solution to improve the economic viability of small farmers’ markets.
Research Methods: Literature Review, Interviews, Surveys, Contextual Inquiry, Observation, Affinity Mapping, User Feedback Session, Cognitive Walkthrough, Usability Testing
Tools: Miro, Qualtrics, Figma, Zoom, Microsoft Teams
My Role(s): UX Researcher, Project Lead
Dates: August - December 2021
Group Members: Sharon Banh, Wendy Gui, Ankur Garg
The Problem
Farmers’ markets have become a valuable and popular commodity in the 21st century and are essential to a strong and resilient local food system. Recently, small farmer’s markets have been experiencing a wave of failure across the United States. Without intervention, this trend of failure could continue — slowly reducing customer access to locally grown food and leaving farmers struggling to support their growing operations.
With the above information in mind, we defined our problem statement:
How can we develop a solution to support the economic viability of small farmers’ markets?
Project Timeline
The Solution
To facilitate social interaction and provide strategies for business expansion, users can browse and engage in topical group discussions with other members of the community.
Discuss
Users can find and connect with other farmer’s market vendors, producers, and managers to build their social network to support more personal interactions and strengthen relationships.
Make Connections
Producers and vendors can find new opportunities to sustain their business by viewing farmer’s markets that are currently hiring and contacting market managers.
Find Markets
Each user can create their own personal profile to showcase who they are and introduce themselves to others in the community
Introduce Yourself
Understanding the Problem Space
Impact — Filled gaps in the existing literature by identifying underlying issues and constraints to a new and under-researched problem space — recent failures of small farmers’ markets
Preliminary Research
After identifying our initial problem statement, we conducted an in-depth literature review and engaged in informal interviews with 5 farmers and vendors at a local farmer’s market.
Our preliminary research was conducted with 3 primary goals in mind.
Uncover current issues and/or practices contributing to farmer’s market failures
Understand the interplay between the different stakeholders and how these relationships impact the overall viability of small markets
Identify gaps conducive to technological intervention.
Key Takeaways
We chose farmers/vendors as our target users after we identified several potential issues that could be contributing to these market failures.
It is common for farmers to have an individualistic mindset that limits their willingness to affiliate themselves with one another.
Farmers lack time to learn new things and socialize with others in their community
Farmers and vendors at smaller markets experience difficulty networking and developing relationships.
User Needs & Design Implications
Impact — Provided an in-depth overview of current behaviors, feelings, needs, and challenges of farmers and vendors
Context
In the next stage of the project, we conducted contextual inquiries and deployed surveys to build empathy with our target users and gain a deeper understanding of their current practices, challenges, and most pressing needs. We identified collaboration as a central theme of the issues experienced by farmer’s market vendors.
Our primary research question guided these methods:
What type of collaboration occurs between vendors and/or farmers within and across markets?
Survey
Information Goals
Acquire first-hand quantitative data from a representative sample of our target users.
Better understand the pain points and challenges of our target users, as well as the various strategies they currently use to improve business success
Inquire about feelings towards collaboration with other farmers and/or vendors, as well as the degree of current collaboration
Findings
We recruited participants in-person at various markets throughout the Atlanta area. In total, we received 43 responses from farmers/vendors, which we analyzed in Qualtrics to identify common themes and actionable insights.
Contextual Inquiry
Information Goals
Dive deeper into points of interest identified through our survey:
Understand the general responsibilities of a farmer/vendor
Understand how farmers/vendors plan and prepare for farmer’s market days
Understand what information farmers/vendors need to know and how they learn it
Identify the existing communication and/or collaboration that occurs between farmers/vendors
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On the market day, we completed each contextual inquiry on the vendor’s side of the stall. Each contextual inquiry lasted for 1.5 to 2 hours.
Key Takeaways
We debriefed as a team, created affinity notes, and organized them into an affinity diagram.
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I do not regularly communicate with the other vendors at the market
I need multiple markets/employees to sustain my business
I need assistance from vendors/employees/volunteers
I want a strong relationship with customers and the market manager
I learn from other growers, vendors, and experience
I have difficulty staying informed of the products I am selling
I use multiple strategies to grow my business
Primary Research Findings
We identified 4 key insights about our target users through our surveys and contextual inquiries that informed future design criteria.
Producers and vendors:
Lack social interaction with one another
Need multiple markets, employees, and other assistance to sustain their business
Need multiple strategies to keep expanding their business
Value having a strong relationship with their market manager
Personas & Empathy Maps
We developed personas and empathy maps for three end users based on insights gathered from generative research. The distinct user groups we had identified were novice vendors, experienced farmers, and farmer/vendor duos.
The novice vendor
The experienced farmer
The farmer/vendor duo
Design Criteria
Our personas and empathy maps helped us determine the core functionalities our system should support.
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Each vendor has their own interests, needs, and motivations for being part of the farmers market community.
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Different contexts in an online environment may require distinct forms of interactions among vendors.
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It is important that our system provides adequate visual information and features to locate markets and learn new business practices.
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Our research found that many vendors learn from their own experiences.
Design Ideas & Feedback
Impact — Used data-driven insights to establish a defined set of core features and functionalities that support farmers’ and vendors’ most pressing needs and preferences
Context
As a result of our research, we narrowed down the scope of our project to focus on answering the following question:
How might we connect farmers and/or vendors with each other to efficiently facilitate knowledge exchange and sharing?
Concept Generation
Brainstorming
We conducted two rounds of brainstorming and concept ideation activities guided by our newly framed problem statement. In total, we generated 60+ design ideas and voted on 4 unique design concepts to receive user feedback.
Final Design Concepts
A digital community board for farmers and vendors that would be physically present in each farmers’ market.
MarketBoard
A mobile application designed to connect less experienced vendors with more experienced vendors, who might be willing to offer various kinds of mentorships.
MarketMentor
A platform that supports live discussion and topic-specific discussion for vendors while they are working in the booth.
Bubble
A mobile application that allows vendors to post their goods to allow other vendors to sell for them.
MarketShare
Concept Sketches Feedback
Objectives
Evaluate our final 4 design concepts on perceived benefits, intended functionality, usability, and overall impression
Understand users’ perceptions of the benefits real-world implementations of these ideas might have
Determine if any specific features stand out to our users as desirable
Identify unaddressed gaps in our solution(s)
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We held this feedback session with 2 target users — one was solely a vendor, and the other was a farmer and vendor.
Findings
We organized our notes from the feedback session for each concept to identify their strengths/weaknesses and develop design recommendations to improve existing issues.
Final Design Idea
The 4 concepts we evaluated during the first feedback session received mixed feedback from our target users. This made it difficult for us to decide on a single concept to move forward with.
We followed 3 steps that led to the creation of our final wireframes.
We deconstructed each design concept into features and decided which ones would be most important to include based on user feedback.
Step 1
Based on our finalized feature set and user feedback, we determined the best implementation of our design solution would be a mobile application.
Step 2
We fleshed out each feature into specific tasks and sketched screens for each one. Before sketching a screen, we listed the relevant information and organized the information hierarchy.
Step 3
We translated the whiteboard sketches of screens into wireframes that we could receive feedback on from users.
Step 4
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Discussions based on “hot” topics
Vendor of the week
Business opportunities
Personal chat
Personal profile
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View details of your farmers markets and other farmers markets
Engage in public discussions with other farmers and vendors
Direct message a user
Explore business opportunities
Wireframe Feedback
Objectives
Gather subjective impressions on wireframes of our final design solution and its primary features
Evaluate the usability and extent to which our final design fits our target users’ current mental models
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We conducted this feedback session with a farmers market manager who had previously worked as a farmer for over 5 years. This session consisted of a “think aloud” task-based usability test.
Our user was given three task scenarios:
(1) Join the most popular group discussion and send a message in the chat
(2) Connect with a vendor who sells flowers
(3) Connect with the market manager to discuss details.
After the completion of each task, we asked targeted questions about specific aspects of the application. Before tasks and after the session, we also asked general questions regarding our user’s perceptions, preferences, and overall thoughts.
Findings
We used notes and observations for each feature to develop design recommendations to consider as we developed future iterations of our prototype. The specific design recommendations are listed below:
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Change the icons used in our navigation bar and add labels to each icon to provide additional textual information
Include more farm information and certification on a users profile page
Provide users with a way to save important chats and previous discussions for later
Implement a “share” feature that allows users to share market information with each other more quickly
Redesign the home page to provide more contextual information regarding its purpose and functions — selecting a discussion topic and joining a discussion
Design Evaluation & Validation
Impact — Developed a novel technological solution in an underdeveloped technological problem space — could serve as a model for future implementations
Context
Mid to High-Fidelity Prototype
We first developed a mid-fidelity prototype of our application based on recommendations generated from our second feedback session.
Due to time constraints, we were not able to receive user feedback on our mid-fidelity design, so we discussed as a team to determine ways we could iterate and transform our final prototype to high-fidelity before further evaluation. Our main objective was to determine the final set(s) of tasks our prototype should support, as well as visual design improvements based on principles we had learned in class.
Our final prototype can be accessed here.
Cognitive Walkthrough
Objectives
Gain an in-depth understanding (from experts) of how our potential users may interact with and respond to our application
Test if farmers’ or vendors’ conceptual models align with TipShares’ current information architecture
Understand how a farmer or vendor might think and act when they use TipShare for the first time
Understand if a farmer or vendor using TipShare could easily and intuitively identify affordances to complete important tasks
Learn if the current iteration of the prototype provides sufficient feedback when completing important tasks
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We had 3 usability and design experts evaluate our application based on the user personas we created. This was important given our target users’ variation in age and technical expertise.
Our experts posed as target users and completed 6 representative tasks guided by actions within our system. After the completion of each action, we presented them with four yes/no questions to directly assess our evaluation goals:Will the user try and achieve the right outcome?
Will the user notice that the correct action(s) is available to them?
Will the user associate these action(s) with the outcome they expect to achieve?
Does the user receive appropriate feedback to see that progress has been made towards their intended outcome?
Findings
We compared evaluators’ responses for each task and prioritized instances where multiple evaluators responded with ‘No’. We addressed these issues prior to testing our prototype with users.
A summary of our findings is listed below.
User is not provided with clear and consistent feedback when they send a message in the discussion forums or direct messages
Users may not notice that favoriting a chat is available to them because it cannot be performed within the chat itself; also provided with insufficient feedback once a chat is added to favorites
User may not be able to effectively differentiate between markets displayed on the “Markets” page
The “sharing” feature in our application does not follow users’ current mental models — it takes too many steps
Usability Testing
Objectives
Understand if users can use our system easily and intuitively
Evaluate if users can clearly identify affordances of the system
Determine if users receive sufficient feedback from our system
Understand what aspects of our system users find valuable and invaluable
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We performed 3 moderated usability tests with farmers and vendors of different products. We chose to do remote usability testing out of necessity and convenience based on our target users’ busy schedules and varied locations.
For the usability test, our users were asked to “think aloud” while completing 7 task scenarios with our system:
(1) Creating a new discussion topic
(2) Finding a discussion topic of interest
(3) Using the discussion forums to send a direct message to another farmer
(4) Following a chat in the discussion forums
(5) Finding a farmer and send them a message
(6) Contacting the market manager of a farmers market
(7) Sharing event details with another farmer -
We calculated performance metrics of task completion time and success rate (across all users) to help identify particular tasks where our users struggled.
Users also completed self-report metrics in the form of the After-Scenario Questionnaire (ASQ), System Usability Scale (SUS), and open-ended questions to assess their satisfaction with our system, its overall usability, and personal preferences.
The self-report metrics we used include:After-Scenario Questionnaire (ASQ) — post-task
To understand our target users subjective perception of their performance for each task in correlation to the time they took to complete the task
System Usability Scale (SUS) — post-test
To gather a high-level impression of our application’s usability from farmers’ and vendors’ perspectives
Open-ended questions — post-test
To assess farmers’ and vendors’ overall satisfaction with TipShare and their personal preferences regarding its features
Findings
Based on our performance metrics, creating a new discussion topic was the most challenging task for our participants.
Overall, SUS scores from our usability test were high, suggesting that our users considered the overall usability of our system to be ‘excellent’.
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Our homepage could do a better job of communicating its primary purpose and functions. We should provide enough affordances for our users to recognize that they are starting on a community discussion page.
For markets that are currently hiring, it was unclear to our users what products or roles the markets were hiring for. This led them to select the wrong market to apply to.
Our current market application process — by messaging a market manager does not reflect real-world conventions as per our users.
Current market information cards do not provide enough information regarding other farmers or vendors selling at a given market.
Design Recommendations
The following design recommendations are based on the data and feedback received during the usability testing sessions with our final, iterated prototype.
Next Steps
Our final design recommendations should be implemented into our system and additional feedback should be gathered from target users.
Begin testing TipShare in a more realistic context — on a farm or at a market — to understand how it would fit into our target users’ current workflow.
Because TipShare is a community-based platform, it would be important to test our application on a small scale with multiple users interacting with each other.
At a later stage, deploying and testing TipShare on a larger scale to determine the long-term impact and feasibility of our solution would help us understand how the features and functions of our application translate to the cohesiveness of the farmers market community as a whole, rather than singular users.
Reflection
The reward (and challenges) of fieldwork
The user research conducted during this project was very rewarding. I extended myself to attend many different farmers’ markets and interact with as many users as possible. As a result, I immersed myself in the lives of farmers and vendors and empathized with their needs and challenges. I also learned how difficult recruiting users could be. There were times when I became frustrated when we couldn’t recruit the number of users that we had hoped to, but I maintained a positive attitude and learned to maximize each research opportunity that I had with our target users.
Learning to be a leader
Lastly, being the project lead for half of this project was a great opportunity to practice my leadership and project management skills. This was one of my first times being a vocal leader and organizer of a team. Based on my personality, this wasn’t a natural thing for me, but I felt that by embracing this role as best as possible, I learned a lot about myself and developed a lot more confidence in my ability to do so moving forward.
Variety is the spice of life and the human-centered design process
Further, this project also allowed me to expand my research toolkit. Being able to practice a variety of research methods revealed the importance that each one can play in the user-centered design process.