Valencia's Best
Eliminating middlemen from farmers' supply chains with Valencia’s Best
MY ROLE
My role was to make 5 interview for customers,(Miranda make 5 interview for farmers ), and Ui design and srategy
DELIVERABLES
User Interviews
High Fidelity Designs
Mobile App Design
TEAM
Me - Emil
Melinda - Ux designer
DURATION
3 months
Project summary
Introducing Valencia's Best: a mobile app crafted to revolutionize fresh produce access, while empowering Filipino small-scale farmers. Seamlessly connecting users directly to local farmers, our platform offers a diverse range of fruits and vegetables at their fingertips. We're eliminating middlemen to bring you a true farm-to-table experience. Join us in supporting local communities and savor the taste of sustainability with Valencia's Best.
My Contribution
As the co-designer of Valencia’s Best, alongside Miranda, we each specialized in distinct research areas: I focused on customer insights while Miranda concentrated on farmer needs. Together, we aimed to create a marketplace linking farmers with eco-conscious consumers, though this vision evolved. A key initiative was offering partial payments to local farmers in seeds, addressing a primary constraint and fostering sustainability in the Philippines. I also took the lead on the UI design, bringing our vision to life with a focus on usability and impact.
Users and needs
Small-scale farmers across the Philippines struggle to profit from their hard work, often due to reliance on middlemen who exploit their produce. These intermediaries buy low from farmers and sell high to consumers, leaving farmers with minimal profit. Our solution disrupts this cycle, empowering farmers by connecting them directly with consumers, cutting out middlemen and ensuring fair prices for all.
Outcome statement
Despite the promising vision behind Valencia's Best, the project was halted due to challenges with the Philippines' infrastructure, which made it difficult to effectively implement and scale the solution. These limitations highlighted critical barriers to connecting farmers directly with consumers, underscoring the need for more foundational support to bring such initiatives to life in the future.
Highlights - Animation
Onboarding process
According to our research, a key priority for users (customers) was finding a way to BUY a small portion of the product and to be fast and ease. Our other user (farmers) want a way to protect their future.
In response, from a product perspective, we decided to tackle this challenge by designing Android app called Valencia's Best that offers a fresh experience, showcasing all the products the farmers offer with a connection to Facebook. Building on this, we then crafted an experience tailored to user needs, grounded in our research findings.
Connection with Facebook
We found that a seamless connection to Facebook is essential for users, so we developed a simple yet effective integration to make this process easy and accessible.
Filter and favorites
A key feature of the app is an advanced filter that enables customers to easily locate and favorite their preferred products, addressing a significant gap competitors have yet to solve.
Broccoli
$5/ kg
Language
The Philippines boasts a rich cultural heritage and over 175 languages, making language selection crucial for inclusivity. By choosing English as the primary language, we aim to create a platform that is immediately accessible to a wide audience, bridging diverse linguistic backgrounds across the country. This choice not only enhances initial user engagement but also lays a strong foundation for future scalability.
User Personas & Flows
We have conducted 10 interview - 5 farmers and 5 customers. Throughout the design iterations—starting from paper prototypes to low-fidelity wireframes and high-fidelity wireframes—we tested our user flows.
Key Design Decisions
Close connection with Facebook
User base - farmers and customers - are active Android and Facebook users. This close connection lead us to chose to make app that is like ecsention of Facebook marketplace.
Simple
We want to create as symple as posible, becouse farmers are illiterate peple.
Interactive Prototype
Learnings
Research
I should have researched if the people of the Philippines even needed this app before we created it. When we understood that they didn't need it, it was already too late. This is how the project ends.
Research
I made a big mistake by spending too much time researching the problems of the farmers and forgetting about the customers
