Fixing the Information Architecture of the Sahabat Jiva app

When I joined Jiva in 2022, we had been leveraging collectors in rural areas to facilitate our business model.

The harvest of a smallholder corn farmer is typically around 2.5k-3k tons. The economics of sending it to the buyer isn’t economically viable for such a small quantity when you factor in labour cost & transport cost. Additionally the ability to evaluate quality at the farmer level is approximate.

[Pricing Graphic] [Corn quality (and pricing) is measured in terms of the moisture content of the corn kernels]

Collectors helped fill this gap by aggregating corn for dispatch from multiple farmers and using moisture meters to estimate quality of the corn.

Jiva’s business model was working with buyers to acquire purchase orders for the corn and coordinate with the collectors to dispatch to feedmills to get the best price. This wasn’t a disruptionary model. The concept of middlemen have always existed in agricultural systems. Jiva and it’s Collectors operated at a country level scale that hadn’t been tried before. The Sahabat Jiva android app was used by our Collectors to manage their Harvest Procurement, their Input sales (In the Agriculture business; Seeds, Chemicals, Fertilizers, Equipments are collectively termed as Inputs) and view their Earnings.

Challenge

Jiva had started off in the pandemic and we hadnt got a chance to observe our users on the ground. When travel started back up and we started investing into qualitative research, we started noticing that our users really struggled to use the app.

These could be narrowed down to

1. The app’s localization was a mess since there had not been a dedicated UX Writer who was involved in the app in the past which led to wrong translations, english terms in various pages and alien terminology being used.
2. Every new user had to sit through multiple training sessions to learn how to use the various features on the app and there was no guarantee that they remembered how to use it.
3. There were many disconnected user flows which needed to be followed in a particular sequence.
4. The Collector’s privileges on the application were managed by the province’s branch manager and finance team due to the financial risk. This led to a non-uniform user experience and rogue user behaviour.

What this really meant was that the Android app was not the primary channel used by the Collector but more of a digitization system while most of the actual activity happened on Whatsapp. There were even cases where our field agents (Activation Co-ordinators, Finance Co-ordinators) may actually be the operators of the application as it had been mandated to digitize every transaction that flows through the system.

Solution

Can you really solve a problem this systemic and prevalent at so many different levels?

For sure! but could we do it at one go? No way.

I advocated to break these problems into multiple phases and prioritized the Information Architecture overhaul as the first step.

[Describe your design solution]

Impact

[Add metrics and impact]