01Case Study Flow
02Introduction
We went to where farmers actually use the app: in the field, in the heat, under pressure. What we heard over five days revealed the gap between what we assumed and what farmers needed.
01 Case study flow
From goals to prioritization
Three phases: define what to learn, run the research, then synthesize and prioritize.
Phase 1: Plan
Phase 2: Execute
Phase 3: Synthesize
Introduction
Five Days in Anantapur
Over a span of five days in Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh, we engaged with at least two farmers daily to understand our users better & identify issues farmers are facing with our app.
This initiative was spearheaded by the Product Team, with support from the Customer Success and Agri Research Teams.
Location
Why Anantapur?
Anantapur was chosen for its concentration of large and influential farmers, despite the presence of Fasal devices nationwide.
Company
Fasal.co
Fasal is helping farmers improve practices via an IoT device connected to an app available on Android & iOS.
03Research Goals
We wanted to understand how farmers actually use the app, not how we assumed they did. What features do they rely on? What trips them up? What would make their day easier? These questions shaped everything we asked on the ground.
04Insights to gather during the visit
Beyond formal goals, we noted a few things to stay alert to during each conversation.
Observational Goals
Key Insights to Gather
Collect qualitative feedback on the issues faced by farmers.
Understand farmers mental models towards different everyday applications.
Assess farmers' tech literacy and general literacy about other languages and practices in farming.
Determine how farmers learn about new things in the market or in general.
Gauge farmers' willingness to update their farming information on our app.
Estimate the preparation time needed for action items.
Evaluate the impact on the product's UX.
05Selection of Farmers & Script Writing
The Customer Success Team had already segmented our users. We picked a spread of segments to hear from farmers at every level of experience and literacy.
Defining tech literacy with respect to farmers.
From these selection criteria we selected 10 users.
We wrote the interview script before heading out: open-ended questions designed to get farmers talking, not just answering yes or no.
"Hi [name], how are you? We are from Fasal. We would love to hear how you use the app and what you would like us to improve."
06Observations from farmer interviews
We met each farmer individually, had them use the app live, and talked through the everyday challenges they face.
The goal was to see the app through their eyes, not ours.
Chandra Shekar Reddy
Pomegranate Farmer
Reddy Uses
Field Notes & Observations
Chandra Shekar ReddyP.S. It started raining. Some farmers sent us home with mangoes, guavas, and oranges.
Field Setup 
Harvest Sorting 
Orchard Survey 07Card sorting : Common Observation
We grouped recurring observations to find the patterns: the themes that kept surfacing across different farmers and different days.
Users are using our application on regular basis, Average usage time is 10min a day.
Farmers are told that our devices only useful for water management and so the market got biased towards it.
Everybody was keen on understanding pest and disease technical names. They were more inclined towards us showing trade names.
People were more keen on contacting the CS than raising a ticket as it is more person to person.
They had difficulty in understanding crop cycle stage wise segregation of activities as the stage name or ribbon was getting ignored.
Most of the farmers have great knowledge about POM Farming and we have observed compare & confirmation bias.
Their decision of pest and disease sprays from Fasal advisory are being manipulated by Local shop vendors.
Most of them were maintaining dairies for activities done farm and finances as that was more comfortable and easily accessible according to them.
Most of them were not using the menu but just the card that is visible on the home. Some of them use alerts but mostly the home.
Farmers were talking about innovation in farming like Robots, AI scanning for disease and pest.
Dosage suggestion was a common ask among all farmers.
Farmers had difficulty in using our back button, they were trying to use main navigation buttons and as a result app was closing.
Most of the farmers are following BT Gore and very keen to learn about new farming methods and how they can improve further.
Diifficulty in Understanding the technical terms we present on application.
Most of the farmers seemed to not have onboarding properly.
08Identified Themes and Possible Solutions
We ran brainstorming sessions using the 3 Whys method to pressure-test each issue. For every idea, we weighed potential impact against effort, which shaped our final prioritization.
Unable to go back using our back button multiple times.
Tech : Fix back button issue. Phone back button is what users are accessing so it can be single click one step back, click twice show warning to exit the app?
Navigation towards going back would match users expectation hence improving experience and removing confusion.
Most of them were not using the menu but just the card that is visible on the home. Some of them use alerts but mostly the home.
Following a widget or dashboard like structure might help us position all the features upfront and accessible.
This will add feature visibility on the application and add quick access from one page to most of the features by decreasing the travel distance of finer and no of clicks. might help in clearing the bias when showcasing the features.
3 gauges present on home but more data is present and scattered across the page loosing context from the plot page.
Follow the same order as present on the plot card & Provide insight to the user about what they can expect after clicking on gauges section.
Follow the same order as present on the plot card & Provide insight to the user about what they can expect after clicking on gauges section.
Time taken to find activities, forecast from the data screen is around 15-20secs.
Using Iconography can improve the visibility of these tabs.
It will act as visual cues for the user to remember easily & reduce the time expenditure to find activities & forecast.
Contextual Clicks are absent
Provide insight to the user about what they can expect after clicking on gauges section. Follow the same order as present on the plot card.
This might provide value to the farmer by removing confusion and adding context to the user so that they wont feel lost and improve adoption on the app. - App usage time might be improved.
09Task prioritization : Rice framework
After aligning with PMs and Directors on the solutions, we used the RICE framework to rank them so the team could start with the highest-impact changes first.
10Conclusion
Five days in Anantapur changed how the team builds. Every assumption we brought in about navigation, data readability, and trust in the app was tested by a real farmer trying to use it. That is the kind of evidence that moves roadmaps.