New Farming, E-Farming
WuNong
Team Member
Angel Tsai
Wei-Pin Hsu
Eight Shih
My Role
IoT device design
User testing
Web UI Design
Project Time
1 year
Tools
Adobe XD
Visual Studio
MSSQL
Ardunio
Visual Studio
Background
Agricultural development is now a global concern. In the transition to scientific agriculture, many semi-electronics have emerged, resulting in a lot of overlapping information in many different documents. It makes the whole planting process very confusing, complicated, and reduces production efficiency, so the transformation of new agriculture often ends in failure.
Goal
Develop a systematic app and websites to help farmers move towards innovative farming and precision farming more easily.
APP
We wanted farmers to be able to accomplish all the planting work in the app, so I summarized a complete and systematic planting process from interviews and past paper materials, and took this process as main idea of my design. I included all records that need to be done for farming and all possible situations in the design.
We went with green as the main color to match the farming theme. Also, I mostly chose to use icons rather than text so that farmers have a visual representation of use the app and understand their cultivated conditions more easily.
Device Design and Testing
We mainly have 4 sensors: light, temperature and humidity, and soil moisture to monitor the growth environment of crops. These are also the data that our clients consider the most important and necessary for the farm.
LDR Light Sensor
DHT11 Temperature & Humidity Sensor
Soil Moisture Sensor
Among them, the light sensor needs to be pre-tested the most, because it will be installed at the top and must be able to withstand long-term sunlight exposure. Therefore, we conducted the light pre-tests to make sure the ability of the light sensor to avoid sensor failure due to excessive high temperatures.
Before the device is officially installed on the farm, I conducted pre-tests on the lighting, temperature, and humidity sensors for about two weeks.
Tests were carried out outdoors and indoors in the morning, afternoon and evening to simulate real farmland and scaffolding as much as possible to ensure that the device could withstand daylight and environment temperature at different time periods and improve the stability of the formal device testing.
Test light sensor in the morning
Test light sensor at noon
Test light sensor at evening
Test light sensor indoor
Website
I designed a simple search website to provide farmers with quick and direct search and display when they need to view a large amount of device data. Considering that farmers are not familiar with computers and do not use them often, the webpage only displays the necessary search fields. I used the drop-down lists and checkboxes so that farmers can more easily fill in the search field without typing.
I chose white as the background color and used a high-chroma color for the content, which made the charts and text displayed on the page cleaner.
App version TAP screen
- Small
- Visual clutter
- No modification function
Problem During Design
The original plan was to complete all planting records in the app, and after the crops were harvested, an electronic Traceable Agricultural Products (TAP) would be directly generated and sent to the testing organization to improve efficiency.
I gave our app to farmers to try out, and some of the feedback I received on my design was that TAP page was impractical for them. The amount of information displayed on the TAP page was too much to be viewed easily. Also, farmers were very inconvenient to make some modifications on this page.
Solution
To solve these problems, I moved the TAP page to the website. I kept the original design style and added modification functions. In addition, for all the fields that need to be filled in the modification form, I choose to use the drop-down lists and checkboxes to avoid typing errors.
I also added download and print functions so that farmers can easily do multiple purposes.
Website version TAP screen
- Large
- Clear Visualization
- Multiple function