Duration
Sept - Nov, 2024
Roles
UI/UX Designer
Colaborations
UI/UX Designers
Overview
FarmLink is a marketplace connecting small farmers with buyers that focuses on transparency and traceability of the agricultural supply chain.
As a founder and product designer, I drove FarmLink’s design from discovery to an MVP, building a brand new platform that digitizes a fragmented trade process and strengthens farmer-buyer trust.
PROBLEM
Farmers usually faced 3 persistent challenges:
SOLUTION DEMO
1. Integrated product traceability form
When posting a product online, farmers provide product's information. These are shown along in the product listing so farmers can prove their products quality with data.
LET'S BACKTRACK THE PROCESS
🤖 Code with AI
Figma MCP Server and VSCode Co-pilot significantly improved our workflow, accelerating MVP development while maintaining strong design quality and user experience.
🔎 Competitor Analysis
To understand the market, we analyzed existing similar platform including UberEats, EASI, DoorDash. Here, we evaluate the strengths, weakness, UX design and business models.
Key findings:
Lack of farm-level data and real traceability features
Too feature-heavy and text-dense for farmers that have limited smartphone literacy
Most promote large-scale distributors, not with smallholder farmers
📍 Mapping Pain Points
From the interviews with 15 small-mid size farmers, here are what we found:
No share & save
"I'd do group order, but at the time I want to order, I can't find anyone around me to do group ordering. I always have to do it alone and end up paying high fees."
📌 Identify MVP Features
We used the affinity mapping to organize the gathered informations. We group the problem areas into themes that help us to address “How might we?"
🍱
How might we help solo diners optimize the fees without placing a large order?
👥
How might we connect users with others nearby at anytime?
📍
How might we make delivery fees seem fairer?
✏️ Design & Build
We visualized small farmers' core flows interacting with the app into rapid sketch and then Figma prototypes.
Design Iteration 1
What I Tried?
A simple view list of nearby group orders that is sorted by the countdown timers until the order is closed.
What Went Wrong?
This helped with quick scan, however…
Not every user knows the location of the pick-up point. Users need to go to map app to search for a specific location which is overwhelming if there are multiple orders
Users prefer to sort orders in distance rather than time windows
Design Iteration 2
What I tried?
Added an in app map and pick up distance from user's current location.
Added the filter or sorting options (distance, time window, cost) that with the minimum number.
Why it worked?
Users can scan quickly based on preferences and easily know the pick-up location without the need to navigate to other apps, minimizing the process of searching.
WHAT I LEARNED
Finding gaps in mature markets
As the app grew to handle more live details and moving pieces, the interface got complicated quickly. Managing all of this taught me how to display a lot of information on a single screen without overwhelming the user. My biggest takeaway was learning how to clean up the noise so the final experience feels clear, easy, and effortless to scan.
🧩
🏅 Recognized as 'Impactful Project' at University of Illinois at Chicago
Let's
design
build
create
together
© 2026 Hayley Nguyen