Over the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Sustainable Harvest by way of Relevance. Sustainable Harvest is one of the largest buyers of organic fair trade in the US and they train hundreds of thousands of farmers across the globe in best practices in coffee production and quality control. Apple has even written a business profile about them.
The applications that we’ve been building for them help the company’s supply chain manage the flow of coffee beans from farmer to roaster with a constant eye towards quality testing each step of the way.
The application that we’re currently working on will be used in the field by washing stations and dry mills in these various countries. The tool will allow the users to improve their process of recording which farmers brought which coffee cherries in for processing, how they were washed, dried, milled, and combined into larger units for storage and shipping.
The gentlemen in the photo above were part of a user testing session that took place earlier this week. Silverback was used for capturing the users’ sessions while they were asked to perform various tasks. Updates to the application will come once we have a better analysis of the Silverback videos (which, in turn, await a viable way to make their way back to the product team - most likely on CD or DVD since Internet bandwidth is rather limited from Tanzania).
One interesting bit of feedback made it’s way back to already though. I designed the interface to use big and “chunky” elements. We knew that the eventual users would be very intelligent people, but not necessarily proficient with computers, so the UI was created to feel more like a simple kiosk than a traditional web app.
It turns out that the users are actually used to visually scanning spreadsheets full of dense data and had difficulty quickly identifying items in this style interface. +1 for real world user testing.
I’ve worked remotely on projects for many years now, but this one really takes geographic diversity to an entirely different level. I’m working in Ohio with the development team in North Carolina for a client in Oregon and building an application for people in Africa. How great is that?
All photos courtesy Sustainable Harvest
