The trading marketplace's business model, which requires a large user base of both buyers and sellers, is usually more successful in highly populated urban centers. Yet discoverability can be more meaningful for rural users, whose networks are more limited and who might otherwise travel great distances without any guarantee of finding a business partner at the destination.

We realized that rural users typically operate in extreme circumstances and that any assumptions about "good" app design would have to be set aside. It was critical that we follow a participatory design process and spend meaningful time with our users in order to understand their local environments, and how this in turn affected their relationship with technology.

Ultimately, we would travel to Ghana five times over a 10-month period in order to engage with local community members and test various iterations of mobile apps designed for these communities. We visited several rural communities and conducted interviews with over 30 users.

These participants were identified by local community leaders as people who were reliable, able to read and speak basic English, and open to adopting new technologies.

INSIGHTS
Through our interviews, we learned that the majority of our users had previously used mobile phones to make phone calls or send text messages, but only 1/2 had prior experience with a touch-screen device, and 1/3 had used a smartphone before. For those who had used or owned a smartphone, the operating system was overwhelmingly Android.

These findings allowed us to identify specific use cases and user profiles that helped us structure the different objectives and skill levels of our users. These fields tests also allowed us to develop mental models and collect feedback that greatly improved app usability.

For example, many of our users were farmers who were less accustomed with high-dexterity actions. We observed that many users were uncomfortable with sophisticated (e.g. swipe) gestures, that were often triggered unintentionally.

Moreover, even though most of our participants could read basic English, it was overwhelming to read through a lot of text, especially if the prompts required decision-making with financial implications.

Similarly, we also found that using strategic color/shape combinations made it easier to teach new users ("press the red square"), rather than trying to describe abstract diagrams or icons ("press the grey thingy that has a purplish line coming off the top").