Reflection

Challenge

Agriculture is the backbone of Africa and in my country Kenya it provides more than 51% of its GDP.  This

is quite impressive. Unfortunately, the Farmers behind this impressive number still live in poverty

conditions. This is because lack information on where to get market for their products, they lack

information on market prices they must depend on exploitative middlemen who take advantage of  their

ignorance. There is also a long distribution chain that dilutes their revenue.

My challenge is to create a simple technology that can be easily accessed by farmers

considering that most of the farmers live in the rural areas with little access to internet services.

Selection

I am decided to use the learning launch tool. We believe this will help us design a simple

yet effective technology that our users can easily navigate. Working with some farmers we have  gone through several design thinking activities to come up with a go-to-market

prototype. Doing this activity has helped us in selecting the learning launch tool for our challenge.  This

tool will help us go through an iterating process that will improve on our solution. Working with the

prototype will help us experiment the idea with a larger group of farmers.

Application

Our first launch we focused on providing a mobile application that runs on a smartphone, with

incredible features like image capture, chat and location. This is to ensure we capture quality

information about farm products farmers would like to sell. Our focus was to observe how farmers

interact with the mobile platform. This process helped us understand our market, many farmers  liked

the idea behind the technology, however, most of them did not own a smartphone and they had  limited

or no internet services due to their rural geographical locations. Most farmers owned the simple  feature

phone that runs on Symbian operating system. After a lengthy observation on the farmers we  realized

we should have focused on human centered design instead of product centered design. We spent  the

next 3 days with both our marketing and IT teams together with the farmers to improve on the

technology to run on a feature phone. We worked through all possible solutions and we settled on

creating a USSD platform.

Our second launch was to release the new platform to a group of farmers to see how they will  interact

with it. Our focus was to observe to see if there were any gaps. Through this process it helped us

understand our market and what our users considered simple. After testing the second platform we  conducted interviews with the farmers who interacted with it to understand their experiences and  to

find out if this second prototype was easy to navigate. Our priority was to ensure that the farmers  could

use the platform with ease.

Insight

By applying the learning tool, we designed and tested our solutions. Through the learning process  we

got to improve our mobile application to meet user’s expectation. It is through this process we  realized

that the farmers were more comfortable with the second mobile application. Moving forward our  business

will focus on human centered design to improve our product and services.

Approach

The learning launch is the appropriate tool for our business. We need as a team to review the insight

gained from our first two launches and incorporate this insight into future launch designs as this is  the

most effective and ideal way of approaching and implementing solutions. Future launch designs  should

reflect insight gained, progress made, and come closer to a compelling solution ready for full roll  out.

Now that you have seen how to implement the design thinking learning launch tool you can try to  implement the other tools.

