"Just For Farmers"
Branding Kit Generator
Fall 2021, UI/UX Design, User Research
My Role
I was the user researcher and UI designer for "Just for Farmers" Branding Kit Generator as part of Stanford's Product Design Core class ME 115A. Our team practiced the design thinking methodology from ideation, need-finding to hi-fi prototyping and pitching. I conducted rounds of user interviews, prototype ideation and evaluation, and I designed the final interface of the product.
My team and I were given the task to reimagine a farmer's market experience for vendors. Through multiple rounds of need-finding, we discovered that small farm owners need access to more affordable high-quality branding materials. This Branding Kit Generator helps achieve that. It has a simple and user-friendly questionnaire that asks for info about the farm. After completing the questionnaire, the generator will output branding and marketing materials for farmers to pick and choose from, including logos, banners, labels, posters, and their very own website!
Overview
Our project summary video
We recognize that most vendors don’t have room in their budgets to hire fancy consulting firms to professionally market their products. That’s why we will provide this online service for free, with the option to consult with a fellow design student for an additional charge. This way all vendors can benefit from this service regardless of financial background.
We hope that Just for Farmers can be accessible to all farmers, especially ones who don’t have websites or basic branding tools. Our value proposition is that small farm vendors should have easy access to basic branding materials, in order to amplify their voice cohesively online and at the market. Our branding kit levels the playing field between small farmers who have smaller resources and vendors who already have branding expertise.
Needfinding
We went out to farmer's markets and made observations on possible need spaces. I then conducted user interviews by reaching out to farmer's market vendors to gain insights on those need spaces and proceeded with ideation. We talked to farmers at numerous farmer's markets and reached out for in-depth individual interviews afterwards.
Interviewing farmers at California Avenue Farmer's Market
Zoom Interview with Katie from Miramonte Farm
We organized findings from our initial interviews and discovered insights ranging from farmers' unwillingness to socialize with customers at the market and their lack of ability to produce marketing materials.
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Examples of Observations and Insights
As a result of observations and user interviews, we identified our users, their needs and the key insights. We chose our directions of ideation using the "How Might We" framework.
"How Might We" framework
Ideation
During the ideation phase, before we narrowed down our focus, we came up with three points of view (POV) that represent different users we could potentially target.
Points of View (POVs)
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Initial Brainstorming
From the three POVs, we brainstormed numerous possible solutions and picked 5 of them to proceed with low-fi prototyping to test for user feedback.
Low-fi Prototype
At this point in the project, we wanted to use low-fi prototypes to test out six different ideas across the digital and physical space targeting the need spaces we found in the earlier phases. The ideas included:
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Easy meal prep app that generates recipes for farmers to cook with their leftover ingredients
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Branding kit generator for farmers
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A vendor-customer exchange experience
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Vendor business workshops
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Farmer's market Tanda
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Vender app to submit tips and tricks on nutrition
See below for my prototype designs:
Figma prototype I made for the Recipe App
Low-fi concept prototype for Branding Kit Generator
Concept sketches for Business Workshops
Concept sketches for Vendor-Customer exchange experience
Concept sketches for Tanda
Final Product
After getting rounds of user feedback, we realized that a branding material generator is the most needed and viable production among our prototyped ideas. "Just for Farmers" Branding Kit Generator asks farmers to ask a series of simple questions about their farms and their products, and auto-generates both online and physical materials, such as a website, posters, banners and product labels. For the premium version, farmers can pay a small fee to work with college student designers to perfect and personalize their branding materials.
As the UI designer, I designed all web pages for the Branding Kit Generator on Figma. Here are some example pages:
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