Agricultural Management System (Farmer App)
Helping small farmers verify product traceability through digital tools
MY ROLE
Founder
Product Designer
2024 - Present
UX Research
UX Design
Information Architecture
AI-Rapid Front-end Code
Overview
In Vietnam’s agricultural market, farmers struggle to sell products fairly because they can’t independently list, price, or manage their produce. Meanwhile, buyers find it difficult to verify the products' traceability and quality.
This case study focuses on the Farmer-facing side of FarmLink. The Buyer-facing experience will be covered in a separate case study.
About FarmLink 🌱
FarmLink is a marketplace that connects small farmers with buyers with the core focus on transparency and traceability to the agricultural supply chain, while empowering small farmers to digitize their businesses.
As founder and product designer, I drove FarmLink’s design from discovery to high-fidelity, building a brand new platform that digitizes a fragmented trade process and strengthens farmer-buyer trust through transparency and traceability.
The Problem ❓
Small local farmers faced 3 persistent challenges:
The Solution (demo) 📱
SOLUTION #1
Integrated product traceability form — helping farmers prove quality with data
When farmer posts a product online, they need to provide essential origin and quality data, such as harvest date, farm location, and certifications. These data is shown along with the product listing.
SOLUTION #2
Self-managed online store — one click to sell products
Any farmer can register an account and open their own online store to list products directly to customers. FarmLink handles the verification process behind the scenes, so farmers can focus on managing sales and inventory instead of paperwork.
SOLUTION #3
Minimized profits loss — direct-to-buyer Marketplace
Farmers directly sell products to end buyers through an open marketplace, FarmLink minimizes profit loss from traditional distribution chains. Farmers retain ownership of their pricing and products while reaching broader markets, ensuring more value stays with the people who grow the food.
Let's backtrack the process ⚙️
🚩 MAPPING PAIN POINTS
To validate the problem, my team and I conducted interviewed 15 small-mid size farmers about their current experience.
Growing fruit
Guessing under pressure 🕐
"I don't know exactly how much I’ll harvest, but I still have to commit to a number, it's always a gamble."
Negotiating price
Middlemen control pricing 🍎
"A good harvest should be good news, but it often means selling cheaper just to avoid waste."
Distribution
Invisible in the Market 📦
"I worked hard for that crop, but once it leaves my farm, I don’t know where it goes or how it’s sold."
🔎 COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
To understand the market, we analyzed existing platform in Vietnam (Bách Hoá Xanh, GrabFood, Lotte) to know more about the current experience of farmers.
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 smallholder farmers who have limited smartphone literacy.
Most promote large-scale distributors, not with smallholder farmers.
📌 IDENTIFY MVP FEATURES
Through affinity mapping, we group the problem areas into themes that help us to address "How might we?" features for the MVP.
How might we make the process easy for farmers to manage their sales independently?
How might we improve farmers product distributions to buyers without barrier in trust?
✏️ DESIGN & BUILD
We visualized small farmers' core flows interacting with the app into rapid sketch and then Figma prototypes.
With the time constrained of shipping the MVP product, we need to ensure that the building fast, simple, and easy to use. We worked on fast and tight feedback loops iterating daily on design and functionality to ensure each screen aligned with evolving product goals and user needs.
RAPID SKETCH
🤖 CODE WITH AI
Average Hours to Code 1 Front-End UI Screen
Utilize Figma MCP Server with VSCode Co-pilot significantly improved our workflow, accelerating MVP development while maintaining strong design quality and user experience.
📦 FINAL PRODUCT: learn-from-used mode
The current MVP turns fragmented, offline produce trading into a single, trustworthy marketplace where farmers sell fairly and buyers purchase with confidence.
Because FarmLink is introduced into a traditional agricultural environment where digital adoption is still emerging, we did not yet have regular users during the pre-MVP phase. Therefore, instead of iterating on assumptions, we adopted a Lean MVP-first approach, prioritizing rapid development and planning for iteration during the pilot testing stage with real farmers at ADC.
Takeaways: Wearing multiple hats 🎭
Being the founder meant stepping into every role. Beyond shaping the visions. I worked with others to make decisions on product priorities, and iterated quickly based on real feedback from farmers and ADC partners.
I also managed the technical foundation, from Figma design systems and React Native development to backend deployment, CI/CD pipelines, and analytics setup, while continuously exploring new tools that could accelerate development. Outside engineering, I handled business strategy, budgeting, partnerships, and market positioning, learning to balance speed with sustainability.
This experience taught me how to think end-to-end, from vision and UX to engineering, operations, and growth strategy.
