WHAT IS PROXIMY ?

Proximy is an application which increases the income of small farmers through short circuits. Our application allows to make a directory of all AMAPS and to put them more in visibility of interested users and potentials. allows

EXPLANATIONS OF OUR SUBJECT

Many small producers are the origin of food supply chains around the world. Despite being key players in the immense challenge of feeding the world, there are many who do not have enough income.

This problem has serious human and economic consequences, both direct and indirect: the families of producers have difficulty meeting their needs or even maintaining the sustainability of their operations because they are not very productive.

As a result, the availability of their products is also affected, which is felt in all stages of the chain to the end consumers.

Many factors influence the income of these producers. Intervening on these various variables through financial, technological, educational and structural solutions would increase the income of certain small producers, and extract them from the vicious circle in which they are caught.

Productivity

Rethinking the circuits

Grants / Aid

OUR SOLUTION

Human/proximity/social (Picture credit Elaine Casap )

It's the AMAPs that make it possible to rethink circuits, to reshape them by offering the possibility of shorter circuits.

One problem: these initiatives are isolated, and there is a glaring lack of communication, of visibility. AMAPs are mostly known by word of mouth, and much of the population is unaware of the possibilities that surround it in terms of producers' offerings.



From there, our idea of application followed: listing the AMAPs. Creating an application seems to be the best response to increase the visibility of AMAPs and thus increase the income of small producers.

The goal is therefore to highlight the AMAP, these allowing to considerably increase the living conditions of the producers because we believe that it is an extremely promising offer but too little used nowadays.

Rural (Picture credit G-R Mottez)

From there, our idea of application followed: listing the AMAPs. Creating an application seems to be the best response to increase the visibility of AMAPs and thus increase the income of small producers.

Our impact

Create links

Our application helps to create links between farmers and consumers by connecting them more easily.

Fair Price

By cutting out the middlemen, farmers are better able to get fair prices that truly reward their work.

Feel secure

By making it possible to reserve baskets for upcoming harvests, the user shares the risk with the farmer. The farmer also receives income before the harvest, allowing him to have a safer business model.

Our mindmaps

First, each of us worked on the following topic: increase the incomes of small-scale producers. Thanks to our research, we have found that short circuits best meet our problem. Short circuits already exist, initiatives have been created in particular in recent years, especially in developed countries like France. It's the AMAPs that make it possible to rethink circuits, to reshape them by offering the possibility of shorter circuits.

An example of one of our mindmap:

Increase the incomes of small-scale food producers. par Melvin Carles

Click here for the links of our mindmaps, do not hesitate to take a look for more explanations:

Then, we had to think together about the identity of our project. We have done a Glitch to bring together all of our ideas: the objectives, the context, our target, our offer, a visual identity, the competitors and some references. You can see our glitch below to give you a precise idea of what we had imagined for our application.

Sketch and wireframes of our project

Secondly, we made a sketch of our project to give us an idea of how the different functionalities were going to be arranged. It seemed obvious to us that the application would be downloadable on a phone.

We then made wireframes to better understand the visual of the application and the first changes were made compared to what we had done for the sketch.

Wireframes are essential to make our idea concrete, and to build it as well as possible! Many versions of our wireframe have been made.

If you want to take a look at our sketch or our wireframes more precisely, here are the links:

Mockups of our application and tests

Thirdly, we made mockups. This step was one of the longest because we had to think about a name and a real identity, with a choice of colors, icons, texts, etc.

Below is the evolution of the design of our application. Our mockups changed weeks after weeks according to feedbacks ( during our tests) and our own reflection.

Version 1

Here is the first version we created.


Version 2

Here is the second version that we presented after test 1.
The main change has been the addition of the functionality to buy.


Version 3

Here is the third version that we presented after test 1.
The main changes was the homepage, the design (logo, return icon...) and the geolocation.


Version 4

Here is the fourth version.
The main change was the introduction of a vegetable basket, and the layout of it. And again some changes in design.


Version 5 - final version

Here is our latest version, after all our tests. Main change: the homepage. Also, we made the last adjustments like the size and position of the logos, headers..it was a lot of details !

You can click here to see what Proximy's mockups look like.


If you want more explanations about the differents steps of the tests, click on the followed button.

More details

For the first test session, we called two people, a student and a team leader. They then gave us several feedback.

Here are the feedbacks of our first user:



Here are the feedbacks of our second user:


After taking into account the various tips of our two users, we made changes to our mockup such as creating a search bar in the map or even adding the ability to see past orders. We finalized our improvements by doing a second test session with two new users, a salesperson and a consultant. We have made the following changes:



You can find here the link of all our tests for the concept number 1, with more details.

After all the tests and our weekly meeting, we had to make some improvements, and here it's our final version !

Technologies and improvements

We would like to use technologies for our application. The main functionality being a map geolocating the AMAPs, we will need to use APIs (application-programming interface) to communicate our application with Google map for example. The user can then authorize or not his geolocation when using our application. We will also be using APIs for the payment functionality.
Using APIs seems to be the best solution. Indeed, API is a set of programming instructions and standards for accessing a Web-based application. It allows applications to communicate with each other without any user knowledge or intervention.
Also, our apps would have to Support IOS and Android system ( We will have to use an App builder )

To improve our application, we would like to insert a chatbot that would answer questions from users (consumer and producer). To create the chatbot, we could, for example, use IBM Watson assistant.
In addition, we think that having the harvest progress in real time would be interesting for consumers since it's possible to reserve a basket in advance on our application. He could then get an idea of when he will have his basket. This functionality could be achieved with a "comments" space that producers could fill in to inform consumers.