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NASA Co-Harvest Dashboard
Utilizing earth data and visual graphics to make informed agricultural decisions
Overview.
Context
Modern farming has become a technologically advanced industry, farmers are commonly adopting new technologies to their agricultural routines. This dashboard was designed in order to aid farmers in managing their crop practices by utilizing satellite imagery, visual graphics, and vegetation statistics.
Timeline
January - May 2022 (16 weeks)
Roles
Victoria Ha - UI/UX Designer & Researcher
Miranda Vo - UI/UX Designer & Researcher
Tools
Figma, Sentinel Hub
The Problem.
“Current farming applications are overwhelming and confusing, therefore impractical for farmers to adopt”
We wanted to design a dashboard that was readily understandable by farmers despite two main inhibitors,
age and education.
By using satellite imagery, our goal was to create a dashboard that farmers could use everyday to swiftly view the current health of their farm, compare it to previous time frames, as well as to other neighboring farms. We strived for our designs to emphasize both clarity and simplicity, so that farmers could make conclusions and predictions of their vegetation level based on factors such as cloud coverage, climate, soil infection, and others throughout the years.
Solution Breakdown.
Various visualizations of satelitte imagery
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Highlight visualizations most understood by farmers
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Naturalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), True Color, Moisture
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Enables users to choose the visualization they are most acquanted with in order to maintain agriculture effectively.
Community networking system
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Through the community widget, farmers can check up on their farmer friends and see how their fields are doing.
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Allows farmers to make their own community, and have a platform to seek help, guidance, etc.
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Farmers can compare their vegetation to their neighbors
Simple Agriculture Productivity Statistics
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Use data from satellite imagery to construct a line graph of NDVI rates over a specified time period.
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Enables efficient and accurate prediction of crop health for future agricultural decisions.
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Users get an alert message explaining certain peaks or dips in graphs
Our Approach.
04. Evaluate
02. Research
01. Define
03. Design
Understanding Problem Space
Defining Project Goals
Forming A Schedule
Stakeholder Interviews
Initial Concept sketches
White Paper Research
Competitive Analysis
User interviews
Insights
Wireframes
Feedback Session 01
Lo-Fi Prototype
User Testing
Hi-Fi Prototype
Expert Evaluation
Research.
Stakeholder Interview
We began our project by holding a client interview to better grasp the needs and expectations the client held for our team. Through this interview, we were briefed on the 3 main solutions stated above, and translated those into an initial concept sketch of the dashboard.
White Paper Research
We then began our white paper research, where we dove deeper into the farming industry and how technology has been received and utilized in agricultural production methods.
“For technology to be most effectively applied in everyday farming practices, it must have low input but high benefit”
"Factors affecting farmers’ adoption of technologies in farming system", 2002
According to research conducted by Truong Thi Ngoc Chi and Ryuichi Yamada, the strongest barriers of farmers adopting technology is low education and old age farmers with embedded cultivation practices.
Competitive Analysis
Other alternatives are visually complicated and overloaded with information.
Sentinel Hub
OneSoil
While keeping the above findings in mind, I analyzed 2 competing applications within the farming/ agricultural space. I found that both lacked understanding of the barriers of farmers of adopting current technology, other alternatives were visually complicated and overloaded with information, making adoption difficult for low educated and old-age farmers.
Comparing other platforms solidified my goal to create a simple and seamless solution for users.
How Might We
help agriculturalists, agriculturists, cultivators, growers, and raisers incorporate satellite imagery and modern technology in their everyday farming routine?
User Interviews & Major Insights
We conducted several interviews with local farmers to better understand their needs and how to apply this to our dashboard.
From our interviews we found that many of the farmers shared 3 high-functioning priorities to be translated into our design.
Task 02
Task 03
High request for being able to see the different fields within their farms to better specify their crop rotations.
Lastly, the farmers wanted to be able to visualize a statistical timeline of vegetation in order to make future predictions of vegetation.
Task 01
The farmers better understood visuals, and therefore preferred having many different visual graphics over text descriptions.
Design.
Wireframe
Taking into consideration our research, client needs, as well as the needs of our users we drafted our wireframe that became the structural pillars of our dashboard.
Feedback Session 01
Our first feedback session was solely with our client, since we previously held user interviews on our concept sketches and wanted to conduct user testing once the design advanced. Here we were able to showcase to our client the prioritized needs of our target users through various dashboard features. Throughout the session, we reinstated the necessity for simplicity of our dashboard, so that it adheres to the needs of our target users and their background limitations. Our client was delighted in the simplicity of the design, as well as the use of large visuals. With this feedback, we moved onto our lo-fidelity prototype.
Lo-Fi Prototype
We began our first prototype design using Figma, and chose temporary design elements to further showcase to our client and the users of the dashboard interface while describing some potential user tasks and scenarios.
User Testing + Improvements
From our user testing, we were able to identify 2 major issues, and some minor decision changes to be reiterated and addressed for in our final designs.
Having a scale for Naturalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to portray vegetation health from poor (light green) to healthy vegetation (dark green) so farmers can easily visualize and compare the health of certain fields. Users also noted some users may not know what NDVI is, so we included pop-up messages explaining what each visualization indicates.
Include a community widget below the weather widget for farmers to compare vegetation with neighboring farms, communicate with other farmers with the chat box, and add farmers as friends to their contact list to create a supportive network.
Excluded "spraying time" feature as most users said it was not applicable to their agricultural decisions.
Zoom feature leads to a transition overlay of specific field, rather than a manual zoom as some users thought manual zoom would be inefficient.
Vegetation Line Graph displayed as an overlay on top of main screen rather than navigating to an entirely new screen as the task completion was much faster.
The Final Screens.
Hi-Fi Prototype
Reflections & Takeaways.
What I’ve learned and would do differently
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Test, Test, Test! If I was given more potential target users, I would’ve loved to conduct more usability tests to gain further insight and reiterate my design process. My testing size was limited, as I had to rely on the connections of the client as it was difficult to connect with local farmers.
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Focus on users' needs versus my own. This was my first project where I didn’t love the design choices made such as color palette, typography, etc. However, I knew that I had to put aside my own preferences if it was better suited for the end-users and stakeholders.
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Learning never stops. Our team was very overwhelmed by the opportunity to design with NASA’s Co-Harvest, as we had very slim knowledge of satellite imagery and vegetation index, however the client provided abundant resources and information where I was able to utilize and reference throughout our design process. Furthermore, I took it upon myself to do deeper research and understand the farming industry as a whole so that I could create a design that wouldn’t be a total black sheep.
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