Cropdots is a mobile marketplace that allows local gardens to connect with and sell to the community.This project is a collaboration with several community gardens and local food advocates. I founded Cropdots, researched and created the project and worked with a development team to build and launch the application and web platform. Cropdots was created to provide a thriving hyper-local sustainable food and product marketplace for communities everywhere.

I spent several months working with local food groups, farmers markets, and gardens to assess the feasibility of the project.UX activities I used to develop the project included:

• A set of user personas that represented my core clients – small classic farmer, micro farmer, local food activists, locavore buyers.
• User research with the personas I had outlined included – in-person interviews, events, email surveys, static beta tests
• To further develop my beta tests for research, and to prepare to develop the application and platform, I created flow charts for key personas, and wireframes of core actions on the app.

The app got significant traffic 1,000+ views weekly, and a small but dedicated membership. User testing feedback was mainly from farms. Many wanted more web tools and promotional services. Buyers were excited by the app but had limited retention without access to high in-app inventory.

The take-away from the project has been that farmers and micro farmers want to spend as much time farming and as little time marketing and doing bookkeeping as possible. Buyers gravitate to easy solutions, and respond to mobile marketplace solutions but have very short retention and expect lots of product and choices.