In the middle of the pandemic, Hureo tested Yara's FarmWeather app with farmers across multiple states of rural India, entirely remotely and in their regional languages. The research gave Yara's product team a clear, evidence-based view of how farmers use weather information, and what to improve next.

The challenge

For a farmer, a weather forecast is a decision tool, not background information. Whether to irrigate, spray pesticide, sow or thresh can depend on a single day's rain or wind.

"If it shows on TV that it would rain, it is still not clear if it would rain or not. They tell the information but do not specify the place. They tell according to UP and not as per our region."

Farmer, India

Yara was redesigning FarmWeather and needed to understand three things before building further:

  1. How farmers currently find and use weather information, and what they still lack.
  2. Whether existing and new users could understand and act on the information in the redesigned app.
  3. How farmers would respond to new features planned for the app.

The catch: it was 2020. Travel to villages was not possible, and the people who most needed to be heard were farmers who rarely take part in research at all.

Our approach

We ran the whole study remotely without losing the observation a field visit gives. Each farmer joined from their own phone over screen share, so researchers could watch every tap and scroll as it happened.

  • Recruitment: farmers from villages across multiple states, with a mix of crops, landholdings and education levels, including both current FarmWeather users and new users.
  • Contextual interviews first: before opening the app, farmers walked us through how they check the weather today, across search, weather apps, WhatsApp groups, SMS advisories, TV and neighbours.
  • Task-based usability testing: farmers completed real tasks in the app while researchers probed what they understood and why.
  • In their language: sessions ran in farmers' regional languages, and farmers chose between local-language and English versions of the app.
  • Close loop with the client: weekly updates with Yara's UX team during fieldwork, then a findings report with a severity rating for every issue.

Impact

The research directly informed improvements to FarmWeather's user experience and shaped Yara's product strategy for its digital farming tools.

Why it matters

  • Rural reach, even remotely: in-depth usability sessions with farmers across multiple states, during a lockdown, without losing live observation.
  • Local language and context: regional-language sessions that captured how farmers actually read and interpret information, not how designers assume they do.
  • Insight a dashboard can't give: understanding why the same screen works for one farmer and fails for another.
  • Part of a longer partnership: FarmWeather was one of a series of studies for Yara across 2019 to 2021, from farmer and retailer ethnography to MVP testing and diary studies.