A group of Organic Terrace Garden (OTG) farmers in RR Nagar produce fresh organic produce every day and already have a good customer base, but they don't have an organised, dedicated platform to sell it.

They sell through a WhatsApp group, though they grow enough for at least 10× the customers they reach today. Here's how a morning in that group goes, replayed from real messages with names hidden.

We researched four problems around us before picking one. Tap through them.

Three questions, in this order: who already does this, what do the farmers actually need, and who exactly are we designing for.

• 01

  What's out there

  Four platforms that connect farmers to buyers, in India and abroad.

• 02

  What the farmers said

  A questionnaire for the farmers in the group, then live interviews.

• 03

  Who we design for

  Three personas, built from those answers.

What's out there

Pluckk came closest: it serves the same urban, health-conscious buyers and also wants to connect producers directly with consumers.

Every one of them moves produce from farms far away to buyers who never meet the grower. None is built for a farmer selling to her own neighbourhood, or lets a buyer ask the person who grew it. That gap is where DESiPLUCK sits.

What the farmers told us

A short questionnaire with farmers from the group, then live interviews. Only two or three farmers answered each question, so read these as conversation starters, not statistics.

Who we design for

Three OTG farmers, drawn from the questionnaire and the interviews. Each one pushed a feature onto the list.

Everything the farmers asked for, sorted with MoSCoW. The must-haves were the requests we heard again and again in the questionnaire and the interviews.

Due to poor marketing and the lack of a dedicated platform, a group of part-time OTG farmers residing in RR Nagar are not able to sell as much as they're capable of.

Our solution-neutral problem statement: it names the people and the pain, and doesn't suggest an answer, so we stayed open to any way of solving it.

We turned the list into twelve requirements and compared every one against every other: 1 if it mattered more, 0.5 if the same, 0 if less. Adding up each row gave its score. 8 and above became a demand, 7 to 8 a wish.

For each demand we went wide three ways: a brainstorm, a mind map and a sketch storm. Some ideas were sensible, some were not, and that was the point.

Then idea bucketing: one idea from each demand, picked from any of the three techniques, makes a concept. R1B2 means demand 1, brainstorm idea 2. We made ten.

To score them we gave each demand a weight, its share of the four demand scores added together (35.5):

• 0.26Best value (9.5 ÷ 35.5)
• 0.25Delivery assistance (9 ÷ 35.5)
• 0.23Communication (8.5 ÷ 35.5)
• 0.23Increased sales (8.5 ÷ 35.5)

Each idea was rated against its demand, 0, 0.5 or 1, and multiplied by that weight. Pick a concept to see how it adds up.

We split the features between us. Mine were the live chat, for customers and for farmers, and the mini-games and rewards.

We listed every piece of content the app could have, audited it down to what earned a place, and simplified the labels people would actually see.

Card sorting

We card-sorted 23 cards with real people to see how they'd group things. I ran four of the sessions: two part-time farmers (49 and 47), a 79-year-old who walks every day, and a 12-year-old.

One farmer grouped the cards the way apps he already used do; another re-sorted hers after realising she'd mixed up two category labels.

The sitemap

Mine first: the live chat and the spin-the-wheel flows as digital wireframes.

The team's

Group wireframes by Dhwani Aggarwal and Harshini Chander.

I designed the logo for DESiPLUCK: a tree mark and the line "Down to earth". Beige and greens from the farm, orange for action, Cabinet Grotesk for headings and Satoshi for text.

Customers buy, OTG farmers sell, and college students deliver, all in one app with three ways in. My screens were the rewards game and the live chat. Play the game with the real screens:

The whole app, tap by tap. These are the final Figma screens from the team, wired up here. Long screens scroll inside the phone.

From the concept sketches: a dating-app-style interface that plays with the customer's psychology and helps increase sales. Swipe right and it goes in the basket.

Fifteen people tested the prototype: four OTG farmers from the group, seven customers and four college students as delivery partners. Each took on tasks for their role while we timed them and noted every slip.

For every task we logged the success rate (weighted by how well each person fit the role), errors, time, how easy it felt and how frustrating it was. Sort any column to find the weak spots.

For the final submission I compiled the project into a Behance case study, then storyboarded and animated its slides.