Offering advice regarding agricultural and rural development, Hushållningssällskapet is a non-profit knowledge-sharing and member organisation consisting of in total 15 regional, independent divisions in Sweden. They work actively with managing land resources and have a vision of an attractive Swedish countryside as a growing industry.
Anna-Carin Almqvist, Project Manager at Hushållningssällskapet Halland:
As an organisation existing for our members, we wanted to improve farmers' decision-making resources when choosing what crop varieties to plant on their land. We wanted an easily accessible tool, like a search engine, for both farmers and advisors where they could investigate how crop varieties have performed during field trials.
As a first step, we hosted a number of workshops and interviews with farmers, advisors, and researchers to discover what needs and pain points the upcoming product would solve. A lot of focus was put on how to make the search results relevant for the user, taking into consideration preconditions such as soil type and quality requirements. We also outlined a format to make it easy to work in layers, so that users at first could get a simple overview and then have the option to dig deeper into the research data.
The initial product discovery resulted in a design prototype and a solution architecture proposal.
Currently, the product is under development and simultaneously, both the project group, consisting of the participants of the workshop, as well as some end-users, are testing the tool. This means that the functionality and the requirements are iteratively being adjusted, resulting in the best possible search engine for farmers across Sweden.
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