REFLECTION-LEARNING LAUNCH

By: Shariful Uddin

BOU

CHALLENGE AND SELECTION

The backbone of my country, the Philippines, is agriculture. The workforce is almost 24%of the

entire population. The farmers behind this amazing figure, sadly, still live in conditions of poverty. This is  because they lack knowledge on where to sell their goods, information on market rates that they need  to rely on exploitative intermediaries who take advantage of their ignorance. A long distribution chain  still exists that dilutes their income. I am the creator of a BOU fertilizer delivery network that  connects small-scale farmers to high-grade fertilizers for lower costs and training resources that can  help them get more sales. My challenge is to build a simple technology which farmers can easily access.

Considering that the majority of farmers live with no access to internet services in rural areas. This is  why the majority of farmers are ignorant and reluctant to reform. The time line for this project should  run for at most 6 months to give our training team team ample time to learn and understood the best  way of teaching approach. Our partners from local cooperative and central luzon states university will  help us in structuring the training model and the distribution network necessary for the business to  survive.

Selection

As a team, we have 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 from the bagong  silang Munoz Nueva Ecija. 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

We focused on delivering a web application that runs on a smartphone with awesome features such as  image capture, chat and location for our first launch. This is to ensure that we gather quality data on  farm goods that farmers would like to market. Our aim was to observe how the mobile app  communicates with farmers. This method helped us understand our business, many farmers liked

However most of them did not own a smartphone, the concept behind the technology, and they had  minimal

Owing to their remote regional locations, or no internet services. The basic function was owned by most  farmers, A phone that runs on the operating system of Symbian. 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

We built and evaluated our ideas by applying the learning tool. We were able to enhance our mobile  application through the learning process to fulfill the needs of the customer. We found during this  process that the farmers became more relaxed with the second mobile app. The implications of this  process have been used by our marketing department to re-strategize our marketing strategy. To  strengthen our goods and services, our organization will concentrate on human-centered architecture to  move forward.

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.

