Selected work
Kovai Natural Farmers: An improved organic grocery retail system
Non-Profit Organization
Role
User Research
UI/UX Design
Duration
Nov 2023 - Mar 2024
Tools
Figma
Team
CEO
Project Manager
Project Designer
Software Engineers (2)
Context
Overview
Kovai Natural Farmers is a non-profit organization in Coimbatore dedicated to producing and traditionally sourcing fresh organic products directly to customers. I collaborated closely with the team to define, develop, and deliver visual designs in a consumer-facing environment. The ask was to create an e-commerce grocery platform for users to shop from.
Role
As the sole designer, I was responsible for evaluating the core needs of the organization and to digitize a feasible technical solution to be built out in less than a year. I primarily worked with CEO Thanikachala Murthy and project manager Murthi Arumugan. I created frameworks and prototypes to share the vision, design principles and CX strategy. This helped to conceptualize ideas, gain alignment and drive decision making.
Project Brief
Kovai Natural Farmers was launched in 2023 and introduced through a Whatsapp Model that allows farmers to distribute fresh organic produce from farms to consumers in the city farmers-market style.
We needed a sustainable way to preserve our mission while making it easy to upload produce & place orders without manually inconveniencing users.
⚡️ The Challenge: Balancing product with an efficient customer experience
The app must strategically incorporate the existing system while having a seamless customer journey from product to checkout pages.
User Research
In order to practice human-centered design, we set out to seek real anecdotes – we wanted to build a product from real user problems rather than come up with a concept from a preconceived idea. First, we conducted a few interviews with current KNF members. We used the findings to structure 2 personas representing the potential customer and farmer.
User Flows
This architectural decision had a major impact on the quality of the user experience and allowed them to quickly familiarize themselves with useful information.
Design
Streamline Adding to Cart
Users felt that moving back-and-forth between product pages and the product list made building their grocery cart redundant and interaction-intensive. Therefore, an ‘Add to Cart’ icon was inserted on each product thumbnail.
Checkout Optimization
With large grocery orders, users felt that there was excessive scrolling required in order to proceed to checkout. The button is now also available at the top of the screen as a convenience feature.
Current Sales
Farmers experienced confusion when adding a produce to their current week’s sales as the menu bar ‘plus’ option was not an effective signifier. Thus, I relocated the button to the Current Sales home page and a separate page to view past orders.
Viewing Orders
Farmers explained how they are not as interested in individual orders as they are in the aggregate quantity sold and profit made against each produce. Improved categorization over a single screen displaying all orders allows farmers to easily view more details if need be.
Result
After many rounds of reviews and iterations, we came up with an application designed with a sense of clarity and purpose and is responsive across android and iOS platforms. Accessible navigation allows users to jump between sections of the app efficiently, accordions make information digestible, and multiple CTAs guide users to make intuitive decisions about the product. It is such a rewarding experience to see an app that I worked on go live and know that many new KNF customers and farmers will be using this platform daily.
Final Consumer View Design
Final Farmer View Design
Takeaways
🤝
Executing Design-to-Development Handoff
This project gave me valuable experience in handing off deliverables for development in a consumer-facing environment. I made a PDF guide with development notes detailing the component types and usage, ensured pixel perfection within organized layers in my final Figma file, and exported all assets with correct naming conventions. This guide helped the developers quickly localize the app for the regional market and transition to the new system as fast as possible.
🌟
Practice Makes Perfect!
Working with an overseas team initially posed challenges in our timeline. However, this opportunity taught me the art of diligent communication. Through each consecutive meeting, I learned to improve the detail of my documentation and maximize offline work. Aspects that previously seemed time-consuming began to streamline when one was able to easily pick up where the other left off.