Mid May, 2022, Dr Samantha Kies-Ryan posted an important and exciting message to the world.

"On Friday May 13, the first container of cocoa beans was sent to chocolate makers in the United Kingdom under the innovative Less Than A Container Load pilot. This container contains cocoa beans from 50 farmer groups and consolidators across Guadalcanal and Isabel, and is the first sign of success that the Less Than A Container Load project."
‍
Earth Water People

The Solomon Islands produce some of the best cocoa in the world. Typically though, the orders exporters in the country recieve are small. This makes it hard for farmers and those further up the value chain to get premium prices for the premium product they produce, as shipping fees small orders that take up less than a container load can become prohibitive.

James Kana (Ueniusu'unu Agribusiness Group) and Samantha Kies-Ryan (Earth Water People) decided to take this problem on and build a new system to unlock the export potential of cocoa producers in the country. They partnered with Australian digital agency Common Code to plan, design and build a product allowing collaboration between exporters, increasing the size of the financial pie for everybody within the industry.

As part of Common Code's team, I worked with James, Sam and Cam Neil and Fabio Vella from Common Code on a design research process involving interviews, clickable prototype designing/building and user testing to arrive at the scope of what was to be their MVP product in market. This research was made all the more challenging because it happened right in the middle of the global pandemic, making travel to interview in person impossible.

Through video interviews with exporters and farmers we made a prioritised list of pains and gains to address with the project and gained a clear understanding of the wording and metaphors that would communicate most effectively in the product's interfaces and communications.

Based on this remote user research our team built clickable prototypes of the LCL platform. We were then able to test these prototypes remotely with users in the Solomon Islands, learning more valuable lessons about what worked and what didn't. We changed the way the platform would work based on these tests and the incredible conversations that came out of the video calls.

One challenge that stands out now looking back on the project was facilitating user testing and interviews with people from a very different culture, context and speaking a different language in many cases (pidgin). Thankfully Sam and James were able to act as translators during the process, and that turned out really successfully. It was a great experience for me and drove home the importance of patience, showing that you're listening and attentive ragardless of whether you can understand what's being said, and looking for non-verbal clues that reveal not only what is being said, but the emotion someone might be feeling, and when what they're saying doesn't match what they're conveying visually. This can be a great way to know when you need to dig deeper on a subject or just give people more time and space to answer more fully at their own pace.

Once we had completed this initial user research phase including testing of clickable prototypes, we were able to use that newly validated knowledge to create a set of simple text only wireframes (or Textframes) that became the basis of the scope for an MVP build of the platform. For this task we used Notion app, as it provided a great set of tools for quick iteration on nested UI with working links and tables and an out of the box collaboration and feedback system. It worked really well.

it might seem curious to some that we moved from quite high fidelity designs during the initial research and prototype testing phase to very low fidelity designs (these textframes) when clarifying scope, functionality and begining to collaborate with developers in the build phase of the project. The reasons are twofold when moving to textframes over higher fidielity designs.

Firstly, our aim, and that of our clients, was to build a first iteration, an MVP, and pixel perfect excecution of the designed UI by the development team wasn't the highest priority. They were able to use the existing prototype designs as guidance on how to lay out UI components, typography and colours usage, but we were more focussed on speedy build of a working platform than we were the details of each view at this point.

Secondly, it's much easier for non-designer stakeholders to provide feedback in a form that we needed when they weren't distracted by design considerations (which we were quite capable of handling ourselves) or the exact functionality of buttons, sliders etc. What we really needed was agreement from all parties in a truth-y representation of what the serctions would be, what language would be used to communicate parts of the platform, and almost as importantly, what wouldnb't be included in the initial build that had been part of our prototypes.

Once scope had been agreed upon, and our development team was able to take this scope into consideration in choosing appropriate technology with which to build our first iteration, a quick week and a bit of development sprints with a small dev team of three shipped the LCL MVP platform. We used a combination of Firebase and React front end for the build.

Since then, the platform has been used to successfully aid 50 farmers, business people and stakeholders to ship cocao to the United Kingdom to great celebrations in the Solomon Islands. Local government and business groups have since been in convseration with LCL on how the platform can be improved, expanded and utilised to even greater benefit to all parts of the cocao ecosystem in the Solomon Islands and beyond.

It's been such a pleasure and a great learning experience to be involved in the LCL project and I can't wait to see where it goes from here.