EXPLANATION OF THE SUBJECT

Small producers are the beginning of the food supply chain all around the world. Despite being key players in the challenge of feeding the world, most of them are struggling to make ends meet.

This has serious human and economic repercussions both direct and indirect: the producers are not productive enough to maintain the sustainability and the quality of their production.

Thus, fewer products are available on the markets and everyone suffers from this lack of variety.

As many factors influence the income of these producers we think that intervening on these variables through financial, technological, educational, structural solutions would increase the income of small producers, and to extract them from the vicious circle in which they are caught.

Productivity

Rethinking the circuits

Grants / Aid

Our mindmaps

First, each of us worked on the following topic: increase the incomes of small-scale producers. Thanks to our research, we have found that short food channels best meet our problem. Short food circuits already exist, some initiatives have been created recently, especially in developed countries like France. The AMAPs make it possible to rethink the circuits, to reshape them by offering the possibility of shorter circuits.

An example of one mindmap:

Increase the incomes of small-scale food producers. par Melvin Carles

Click here are the links of our mindmaps, do not hesitate to take a look for more explanations:

Then, we had to think together about the identity of our project. We have done a Glitch to bring together all of our ideas: the objectives, the context, our target, our offer, a visual identity, the competitors, and some references. You can see our glitch below.

Sketches and wireframes of our project

Secondly, we sketched our project to have an idea of how to arrange our functionalities. It appears to us that the application must be downloadable through a phone.

After that, we have created wireframes to better understand the design of the App. We used our first sketches to upgrade the App figma.

Many versions of our wireframe have been made.

If you want to take a look at our sketches or our wireframes, here are the links:

Mockups and tests

Thirdly, we made the mockups. This step was one of the longest. We had to think everything through, an identity, the colors, the icons, the texts, etc.
Below is the evolution of the design of our application. Our mockups changed weeks after weeks according to feedbacks (during our tests) and our reflection.

Version 1

Here is the first version we created.


Version 2

Here is the second version that we presented after test 1.
The main change has been the addition of the 'buy' functionality.


Version 3

Here is the third version that we presented after test 1.
The main changes were the homepage, the design (logo, return icon...), and the geolocation.


Version 4

Here is the fourth version.
The main changes were the introduction of a vegetable basket and its layout, and some new changes in the design.


Version 5 - final version

Here is our latest version, after all of the tests. Main change: the homepage. Also, we made the last adjustments: the size and position of the logos, of the header. A lot of details!

You can click here to see what Proximy's mockups look like.


For more explanations on the different steps of the tests, click on the followed button.

More details

For the first test session, we asked two people: a student and a team leader. They then gave us several feedback.

Feedbacks of our first user:



Feedbacks of our second user:


After the first feedbacks, we made changes on our mockup such as creating a search bar in the map or even adding the ability to see past orders. We finalized our improvements by doing a second test session with two new users, a salesperson and a consultant. We have made the following changes:



You can find here the link of our tests.

After all the tests and a weekly meeting, we had to make some improvements, so here it's our final version !

Technologies and improvements

We want to use some AI or new technologies for our App. The main functionality being a map geolocating the AMAPs, we will need to use APIs (application-programming interface) to communicate our application with Google map, for example. The user has to authorize or not the geolocation when using our App. We will also be using APIs for payment functionality.
Using APIs seems to be the best solution. Indeed, API is a set of programming instructions and standards for accessing a Web-based application. It allows applications to communicate with each other without any user knowledge or intervention.
Also, our apps would have to Support IOS and Android system (We will have to use an App builder)

To improve the App, we would like to insert a chatbot that would answer questions from users (consumer and producer). To create the chatbot, we could, for example, use IBM Watson assistant.
Besides, we think that having the harvest progress in real time would be interesting for consumers since it's possible to reserve a basket in advance on our application. The consumer could then get an idea of when he will receive his basket. This functionality could be achieved with a "comments" space that producers could fill in to inform consumers.