Ricult
Connecting farmers with a financial ecosystem
In this project, the challenge was to connect farmers, mills and financial institutions through a digital ecosystem and products within the agritech sphere. The goal was to improve and strengthen financial inclusion for farmers.
Our approach was to start with design discovery workshops and stakeholder interviews, and to explore the value proposition to identify how and where design could deliver the greatest value within the existing ecosystem.
- Timeline
- 6 months
- Role
- Lead design
Product design
- Client
- Ricult
- Industry
- Agritech
Fintech
The challenge
Understanding the problem
The trickiest part of this project was to understand the initial brief and value proposition, and how all the parts involved were connected.
The project was within a niche market between agritech and fintech, with stakeholders across the whole spectrum, from smallholder farmers and processing mills to commercial banks, operating in three countries: Thailand, Vietnam and Pakistan.
On top of that, there was also satellite technology.
Design discovery
Aligning business and user needs
To map out the project and evaluate the original brief, we ran a few design discovery workshops with stakeholders from across the organisation. The aim was to understand business goals, user needs and operational challenges. It revealed that the greatest opportunity was not the farmer app, but the internal agent application used to support farmers.
This gave everyone a shared understanding of where to focus before moving forward. The challenge was to turn a complex agricultural ecosystem into something useful for people with very different roles and levels of technical experience, while balancing the needs of farmers, agents, supervisors and the wider business.
- Stakeholder workshops across the Ricult ecosystem
- Identified user needs, pain points and business goals
- Challenged the original farmer-app brief
- Prioritised opportunities based on potential value
- Selected the agent application as the primary focus
- Established alignment around a new product direction
In the discovery workshops, we sought to achieve the first component of design thinking, to fully understand the problem statement.
Value proposition
Profiling the entire value chain
An important step in the design thinking process is to fully understand the problem you are trying to solve. During our workshops, we used a value proposition canvas to explore this further.
Through separate workshops with each stakeholder group, we mapped their needs and potential solutions to challenge the problem statement and identify where we could create real value.
This helped us avoid designing features that nobody wanted.
Personas
Understanding the target audience
In this project, we had many moving parts and several types of users. Beyond the four clear stakeholder groups, there were also cultural differences between the three countries where the service operated.
To better understand our target audience, we created personas. These helped us map stakeholders within the service and answer key questions when working on user journeys, designs and tasks.
Service mapping
Connecting all the moving parts
Another important aspect of designing a service is to use service mapping to understand how all the different parts connect. We therefore mapped out the full ecosystem based on what we learned from our value proposition workshops.
We also created journey maps based on known user stories to challenge our ideas and see how activities connected to touchpoints and systems in our design. Together, this gave us a clear picture of what to prototype and test.
Rapid prototyping
Turning ideas into something testable
Once we had a clear picture of the service and what was required to design the whole ecosystem, we set out to design a few vital parts in low fidelity and built quick clickable prototypes for usability testing.
With an iterative approach, we could speed up the process and involve engineers early to understand what we were building. This also helped us work in an agile way, with agreed deliverables for each development sprint.
Research
Validating ideas with real users
It was now time to test our assumptions and hypotheses with the right target audience through usability testing and 1:1 interviews. Our early design prototypes were put to the test, with a focus on day-to-day operations.
Testing uncovered usability issues, clarified user expectations and highlighted opportunities to simplify complex tasks. These findings guided the design process and helped prioritise improvements before high-fidelity design and development.
- Usability testing of key workflows
- Task success and satisfaction measured
- Actionable design recommendations
Every member of the project team demonstrated professionalism, genuine enthusiasm, and a deep commitment to achieving results that matched our internal team's dedication. We are absolutely delighted with the final outcome.
The agent app
Supporting farmers in the field
Many farmers struggle to find the resources for crop cultivation, so naturally, our main focus ended up on an agent app designed to support farmers in the field.
This allowed agents to monitor and advise farmers whenever a problem arose. Agents could also onboard new farmers, manage individual cases and track each step from seed to harvest.
Farmer app
Strengthening financial inclusion for farmers
When this project started, we already had access to an existing farmer app. We decided early on to focus on a new agent app instead, as research and interviews revealed that farmers were often supported by agents.
We therefore refined and realigned the existing design with a consistent design language and improved user experience. We also explored future solutions to support greater financial inclusion and connect farmers directly with banks.
The portfolio app
Seeing the bigger picture
The second part we delivered was a management interface that gave supervisors an overview of agents and their connected farmers. It brought together analytics, work planning, weather forecasts, crop recommendations and other information needed to manage agricultural operations.
The wider solution also included farmer profiling and loan assessment, with concepts for connecting financial institutions to help evaluate and manage credit risk.
The result
Creating financial inclusion for farmers
What made this project particularly unique was the collaboration between multiple teams across different organisations. In my role as product design lead, I worked with researchers, user interface and user experience designers, Ricult’s product team and their outsourced app developers to implement an iterative design process.
In the end, we managed to design, test and deliver a complete solution to support farmers with crop cultivation and help supervisors use data on crops, weather projections and other risks. By integrating satellite data and accessible reports, we could track each step from seed to harvest, while connecting farmers, agents and banks to support financial inclusion.
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- Platforms
- 36
- Modules
- 208
- Workflows
- 2030
- Screens
