UX Case Study: Crowde
Indonesia is one of the most environmentally rich countries in the world, so naturally there would be many who’s livelihood depends on farming those resources. Farmers are one of the driving work forces in Indonesia today, but sometimes they need help too and that’s where Crowde comes in. Crowde helps those farmers reach investors for funding on their projects in a way that benefits both parties.
Background
For this project I was tasked along with two other people (Ridwan Affandi & Retno Pratiwi Andari) to help redesign certain aspects of the agricultural funding website known as Crowde.
Me and my two other coworkers shared equal responsibilities on all designs but we made sure that we all worked to together at the same time to make sure that communication was always solid. We made it a rule to try and always be online during designing hours and to also keep an open mind when discussing possible changes or difference in ideas.
In order to start the redesign we first needed to understand what exactly were the issues that we were trying to solve. That is where we shall begin the design process.
Problems
From discussing with representatives from Crowde about their user base it was clear that they were fairly different compared to other applications. Their core userbase are of course farmers, and they said themselves that a lot of farmers are not exactly used to using apps compared to other people.
So one of the main points that we needed to figure out was how to redesign the website in a user friendly way for users that aren’t used to using technology all the time. At the end of the day if the user has no idea what the website page does then a nice looking website won’t matter at all. We discussed on figma what are the sorts of problems (minor or major) that are present in the website itself and saved them for future reference.
From the discussions that were had we concluded that some of the things we notice with the website were:
- A confusing user flow that ends up confusing the user when they expect a feature to do a certain thing but ends up doing something completely different
- Text that are meant to help describe what a certain feature does ends up sounding vague and not helpful
- Info about features seemed lacking and needed more clear descriptions with the user involved
- inconsistent use of colors and other assets leading to confusion on what is important info
Solutions
Next on the agenda was discussing with my team various solutions to the problems that we listed in the pain points section. We sat in a zoom call and proceeded to discuss just general ideas and concepts that might end up being good enough solutions. This is what the discussion produced:
Some of those solutions involved making design changes that involved more information being placed on the screen as to avoid confusion with the user. Other solutions include highlighting the FAQ section (Frequently asked questions) to help some of the older users with whatever problems they may have. These are just some ideas that me and my team came up with during this process.
User flows and Wireframes
Now that my team had finished discussing solutions and problems, we can finally start designing the solutions to those problems in the form of user flows and wireframes. Designing the user flow helped me and my team get a clearer image in our heads of how each feature/process was going to work, and wireframes help even further by being a rough sketch of what the final design might look like.
We decided to do about 3 flows for 3 different features and those features were:
- Login / Sign Up
- Farmer asking for investment
- Investor looking to fund farmer
Those 3 flows were what we considered the most important features that we needed to highlight. We wanted to get a clear and precise idea of what exactly our version of these features would be and what better way to do that than with user flow and wireframes. Here’s an example for the flow of being a investor who is looking to fund farmers projects:
UI Styleguide
Next up on the agenda was choosing the design assets that we were going to use when it came to designing the final product. We had to choose all the basics such as colors, font, buttons and all the input fields as to make sure that each frame was consistent with the design as a whole.
Colors
The colors were pretty simple because Crowde had given us a set template of main colors that we were meant to use. Those were of course the main colors of the website and some extra colors just in case we needed them
Font
The font was also fairly simple because Crowde also had a set font that they wanted us to use. All we had to do in this situation was to choose the weight of the font and what sizes were needed.
Buttons & Input Fields
We wanted to make sure the buttons were very visible and bright to make sure that it would stand out on any page. We noticed that some of the buttons on the website were different colors and we thought it would be better for most of them to be in all the same color as to avoid confusion. We chose orange as the color as it was also the main color of the website. We made 3 versions which were one for when the user was hovering over the button, one where it was disabled and last one for when it was idle.
For the inputs we decided to go for a cleaner version that doesn't have a box around it. It wasn’t too difficult to pick an input because most inputs have a general same look about them and this was mostly about preference.
Prototyping
Now it was time for the final step of the design process was making a usable version of the final website design. We made example inputs for every page as to make it as usable as possible and gave it the proper animations to make sure the website looks as good as possible. We ended up with a new signup/login page, revamped investor user flow, revamped farmer user flow and also a new emphasis on the FAQ section to make sure the users questions can be answered quicker.
Here’s the link to the prototype
Usability Testing & Iteration
For the final step of this design process, me and my team needed user feedback as to whether the website is as effective as it can possibly be. To do that we made sure to get a respondent who fits our target demographic which is an older farmer in the ages of 30–50 years old.
In the usability test we asked him multiple questions regarding all of our user flows and whether they caused him any confusion, and it went surprisingly well. The respondent felt that even as a first time user the website had enough information that he could understand every step of the process clearly which was wonderful to hear. My main concern was that as someone who rarely uses technology, the user would have a lot of initial trouble just understanding how everything worked but thankfully it was the complete opposite.