Changing behavior with design

To illustrate the concept of cognitive bias and problem-driven design from my previous article, here's a story about agronomists.

What's an agronomist?

An agronomist manages agricultural systems with an emphasis on ecological and environmental perspectives. We (IBM iX) helped a large coffee producer overcome design friction in the assessment work of their agronomists while evaluating and educating coffee farmers around the world. Increasingly, with the help of digital tools, they help farmers grow more high quality coffee and be better farmers–raising crops in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. 

We practiced empathy from the start with collaborative sessions to foster understanding. We identified key users and pain points, but our main source of information started with the management team in the global headquarters. We quickly realized we were making decisions based on many assumptions. We continued with an online survey in 16 countries with more than 160 respondents. We asked about time spent at a farm, main tasks, travel time between farms and more. We followed up with 19 interviews to capture detailed information about day-to-day activities, working environment as well as use cases from the agronomists and up the hierarchy to the global program manager. This activity generated a back log of over 300 user stories across three key roles. We prioritized stories and created key journeys based on specific scenarios such as planning farm visits, making farm visits, post-visit office work and more.

With these specific scenario-based journeys as a guide, we started creating interfaces for the mobile application. We worked directly with users, as well as faxing and screen sharing for feedback from remote users. We mapped those sketches to a specific screen flow and created a clickable low-fidelity prototype. With each round of feedback we moved the prototype to a higher level of fidelity. Needs-based revisions were done in hours and days rather than weeks or months. We then created 50+ high-fidelity screens for the main interactions with specifications for the development team which was already in active with back-end integration work.

We had to fight for empathy

In my previous article I mentioned the disconnect of the executives and confirmation bias. The team in the headquarters was ready for us to start creating screens after the first workshop, but had many assumptions and open questions. Some of the missing information was fundamental like 'how much time do the agronomist normally spend on a farm visit?' or 'distance travelled between farms?'. As a result we fought for more time and budget for the survey and interviews as well as the extra iterations with the paper prototypes. 

Rain or shine, it doesn't matter?

We assumed weather information was key. We had to work against our own confirmation bias regarding the weather forecast on the main screen of the app. It was mentioned in interviews and the survey, but after seeing the paper prototype no agronomist wanted to check weather on this app before heading out for farm visits. They had other sources for weather forecasts. It was part of a different daily routine. Acknowledging our own confirmation bias and that of the users, we needed to refocus on what factors would drive the agronomists' daily decisions to get out to the farms. We used some concepts of gamification. We created visuals for monthly targets and regional averages with color coding to indicate current productivity levels, such as green for "on track."

Save as draft saved us

Another example of confirmation bias was from the headquarters team, who had the business need to have as many completed farm evaluations in the shortest time possible. The solution was assumed to be usability improvements for quicker execution of the evaluations: Make the assessment tool easy to use so the agronomist can do it faster and get more done. After the survey and interviews we started to glimpse the reality. We learned during the paper prototype feedback they are only able to complete specific sections of the assessment on each visit. They simply must walk around the farm making observations and the visit process can not get much faster, unless they started running. As well, the agronomists need to visit many farms in a week, sometimes 2-3 in a day. Distances between the farms can be long. Additionally, the farmer does not have that much time as they need tend to their crops. The agronomist needed a way to complete and share just portions of the assessment, only what was captured from the current visit. The assessment could be saved as a draft to be continued or completed on the next visit. As well, we created a simple summary to present to the farmer what had been documented in the assessment.

A synchronization screen builds trust

Negativity bias existed from the previous tool. The agronomists were often working offline–with no network access. In a couple instances some assessment data was lost. As a result they started using paper, which resulted in inaccurate data capture and time lost duplicating work back in the office. The false insight was the synchronization of data was a key to success. It was not a UI requirement but instead a "back-end" issue–simply a matter of auto-saving, which would be a seamless invisible experience for the users. In reality, of course, the back-end stability was key, but the interface needed to bring back the trust. Our UI elements needed to reinforce the stability and reliability of their new digital tool and to simply let them know their work was safe. The result was an icon in the main navigation and a dedicated sync screen showing the status of assessment sections to be synchronized.

 the back-end stability was key, but the interface needed to bring back the trust

Don’t reduce our craft to chance

When landing on the right solution, it will likely not be an “ah ha!” moment for us as designers, but instead, “of course.” Michael Semer has a great article about "the forehead-smacking realization that the parts of this particular puzzle were there all along, waiting to be put together". The legend of “great ideas” as light bulb moments is false. Please don’t reduce our craft to chance. It is the blood, sweat and tears of our design process that creates great experiences. 

 Please don’t reduce our craft to chance.

How can we better understand our users’ perception or decision making? Remove our confirmation bias about what the solution should be. What does it take to change user behavior? It takes a deep understanding of their emotional and functional needs to overcome negativity bias. Behavior change happens with gentle nudges, baby steps from the as-is scenario to the to-be scenario–the future state... and perhaps some principles of gamification.

By using design as a problem-driven way of working–not a project deliverable–we maintain a risk-mitigating, learning and testing environment through our process of creating better experiences and solutions. 

This success story ends here, with the "good" part

This corporate initiative engaged 675 agronomists to help more than 200,000 farmers in 21 countries to use sustainable farming practices, better manage their natural resources and be better stewards of the land they manage.

Notes

#UX, #CX, #CustExp, #Cognitivebias, #DesignThinking, #IBMiX , #IBMDesign