Carib Farm.

Context.

The Caribbean region is made up of a collection of small islands in a tropical environment that is generally lush but prone to hurricanes. Many of the farms in the region are micro-farms. From her personal experience living in the Caribbean and managing her local market garden, Laura saw how the islands are on the front lines of climate change, farming on them requires fast solutions and an evident lack of reliable farming information. Her passion for this problem space grew until she presented her idea for a solution for a co-learning network (particularly for under-served farmers) to the Caribbean Climate Innovation Center in 2020 and began conducted stakeholder interviews.

Goal.

Our team was brought on board to conduct user research, with two primary goals in mind. First, we were to determine the needs, motivations, and pain points of primary users—the local farmers themselves. Previously in the initial research from 2020, mostly stakeholders and organizational leaders had been interviewed. Now, Carib Farm was ready to understand the true user’s perspective. Our second goal was to discover if the research from 2020 aligned with the post-COVID challenges that Caribbean farming communities now face since the global supply chains had been affected.

Our client wanted the following deliverables to gain a better understanding of their target user as their other teams moved onto developing the beta version of their product:

• Existing Research - Synthesis Presentation

• Existing Research - Affinity Map

• User Research - Interview Script

• User Research - Interview Recordings

• User Research - Affinity Map

• Empathy Maps

• User Journey Map

In addition to those deliverables, our team compiled a Users Benefit List to be used for strategic marketing and a User Survey to gather a list of interested members. Our team also compiled a final report to summarize our work. Please feel free to take a detailed look at our end-to-end work below:

Synthesizing Initial Research.

Since two years had been dedicated to research, an extensive amount of content had been accumulated—and our team dove right into it. Previously, interviews had been conducted with local and organizational leaders in the Caribbean working to improve the agricultural industry. See the post-its below for more details about these leaders. We immersed ourselves in these existing interviews, listening to the recordings, taking notes, and building out an affinity map to synthesize what had already been found.

Goals/Motivations:

• Food Security and Sustainable Economic Development
  The region is currently heavily reliant on food imports and the tourism industry. Both can be very fickle and were massively disrupted by COVID. There is a growing awareness of the importance of developing local production both for reasons of food security and economic stability and growth.

• Empowerment and Changing Mindsets
  One of the interviewees said, ““[...] now that people feel valued, they feel the relish to do the work and to do it well.” There has been a changing perception that the farming industry is not a second-tier job compared to other “white-collar” roles. Feeling valued as a local farmer is fundamental to all of their work.

Challenges:

• Accessible, affordable financing

• Access to information and technical support

• Input shortages from time to time + high cost of inputs

• Current lack of organization

• Post-colonial fallout, history of corruption, and the legacy of mistrust

• Food is closely associated with politics

Please view the slide deck below for the full analysis of the existing research:

New Research Questions.

From the current research, a solid picture of the farming industry in the Caribbean was painted for our team from the existing interviews with organizational leaders. That said, we wanted to focus our next research efforts on the future Carib Farm users, the local farmers themselves. Building off of the previous research, we developed a set of research questions to inform our future user interviews to understand the critical needs of local farmers. Most of these questions pertained to education and technology since those were major gaps in the existing research:

1. How does technology currently fit into the lives of farmers and other members of the agricultural ecosystem in the Caribbean?

2. How do Caribbean farmers currently access information?

3. What information are Caribbean farmers currently accessing?

4. How supported do Caribbean farmers feel?

5. What would they like to see improve/develop in regards to informational resources?

Almost immediately after synthesizing the existing research and interviews, our team wanted to change our planned research method from user interviews to a user survey. We initially thought that the survey would provide us with more quantifiable data about the local farmers than conducting user interviews would. When suggesting this to our client, they expressed some reservations. Through a group call, we realized that our client hadn’t seen our ongoing work yet and was therefore hesitant to trust our change in wanting to solely run a user survey.

After sharing the synthesis of the existing research, our client was much more comfortable and therefore receptive to the suggestions we had to make for the next steps. Through another session of collaboration with the client, our team compared the benefits of user interviews with those of a user survey. During that dialogue, we realized user interviews were still critical to establishing a persona of the local Caribbean farmer. A user survey would not help identify critical needs in the same way that interviews would. As a compromise, we concluded to create a survey for Carib Farm’s future use that was specifically geared towards any remaining gaps in user research after the interviews had been conducted.

Process.

To map out the scope of the project, our team broke down the agreed-upon deliverables into a 4-week project plan.

However, COVID-19 brought much of the project launch to a halt and brought a new shift to the farming industry in the Caribbean in 2022. For more information on Carib Farm, feel free to view the video from the founder below:

To do so, our team created a color code system within Figma, where each interview had a designated color. As we listened to the existing interviews, we noted key details, concepts, and quotes on digital post-its with their corresponding color. After listening to each interview, we began to group post-its with similar content/concepts.

The screenshots below demonstrate this process and the main groups we ended up with:

Key Insights From Existing Research.

The main ideas (noted on the purple circles in the screenshots above) led our team to tease out the goals, motivations, and challenges of farmers in the Caribbean according to the information shared by the leaders in the existing interviews.