AgFAB - A Farmer-centered Agricultural Bower

Abstract

Digital Agriculture aims to raise agricultural productivity while empowering the farming stakeholders (especially the farmers) with the availability of ICT-based applications on smart devices. However, despite putting in much effort, smallholder farmers’ willingness for adopting digital technologies is low in developing countries. In this study, following the principles of the human-design process, we investigated the smallholder farmers’ core demands from mobile/computing application(s). Considering these core demands of the farming community, the developed prototypical interfaces were evaluated by farmers using the System Usability Scale (SUS) to check the acceptability of a proposed farmer-centered solution named AgFAB. The AgFAB prototypical interface design received an average SUS score of 72.37, which is an indication of an acceptable design. Moreover, the results of Paired T-test seem promising for the strong adoptability of AgFAB by farmers with reference to their aspect of usability in the agricultural context.