How we designed and developed farmer marketplace apps

Noah

Mobile and web development for farmer marketplace apps

UI/UX design

Mobile development

E-commerce

Swift and Kotlin

Laravel

Angular

Project Idea

In 2019, our team was contacted by a startupper from Sweden who wanted to develop a farmer marketplace app that would become a contact point between local food producers and ordinary consumers.

The idea behind the project is to make the local area less dependent on foreign food suppliers and allow farmers to reach a broader market with the help of the Noah application. To get profit, our client wanted to charge marketplace commissions.

Our task

Our task was to design and develop interfaces for three apps: iOS and Android mobile apps for consumers, a mobile application for food producers, and a web admin panel. The customers contacted us in March, and their goal was to get apps before the harvest season. In Sweden, it usually lasts from July to October. That’s why we had to accomplish the work with Noah farmer marketplace apps within 4 months.

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UI/UX design

In the process of UI/UX design, we created a recognizable branding style, so the app could break away from the competitors, developed a UI Kit to make the design easy to scale, and built the environment where farmers could promote their brands.

Branding

Our design team developed the branding style of the Noah project. The choice fell on the neutral white and gray color palette with calm orange accents that nicely combine with vivid product photos and don’t distract users from browsing marketplace goods.

The farmers can present their brands on the marketplace and add logos and photos to their profiles. That’s why we made the UI of the app minimal and versatile, so it could match brands with both vivid and calm visual styles.

We also designed an app icon to present the Noah application in the App Store and Google Play. In the process, we used Noah’s corporate color and added two main letters of its name. We avoided using extra details to get rid of visual noise and make the icon look clear both on the web and on mobile devices.

UI Kit

UI Kit is a set of elements that can be reused in the process of design and make the design easy to scale and fast to build. We based our UI Kit on iOS and Android guidelines to make the design consistent across all the apps, speed up the design process, and provide a trouble-free release to the stores.

Development

The Noah team chose a native development approach for their mobile apps. That’s why we built two separate mobile app versions using Swift and Kotlin. The native approach ensures high app performance and a smoother in-app experience.

The web admin panel was built with Angular and Laravel. These frameworks provide many reusable elements, which greatly speed up the development of farmer marketplace apps. To speed it up even further, we implemented multiple third-party integrations.

Google Map SDK

Google Maps SDK is a toolset that enables dev teams to integrate Google Maps into custom software applications and adapt maps to the application’s needs. For instance, change the map style, add markers, and draw custom overlays.

Stripe SDK

To make the service flow convenient and complete, we needed to enable in-app payments. To pay for farmers' services, users had to leave their payment details inside the app, which meant that payment technology needed to be extra secure. Stripe SDK is a toolset that ensures secure info transfer and storage and allows not storing payment info on the device. Extra data protection ensures that the app owner won’t suffer reputation losses.

Firebase services

Noah owners wanted to get a convenient system of analytics to explore user engagement and behavior to improve UX and raise user retention in the consumer app. To install the system of analytics, we used an out-of-box solution provided by Firebase. We also used it to implement Google authentication and in-app messages.

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Key app features

As a result of design and development, we managed to implement the following flow for three roles: marketplace consumers, farmers, and managers.

Consumer app flow

With the help of the consumer app, users can search for products and farmers, add items to the cart, check info about farmers, go through the checkout process, and either order delivery or arrange pickup.

We enabled registration and sign-in with social media accounts, so users don’t spend too much time on this step and could go straight to shopping for fruit, vegetables, and berries.

The app offers multiple search options to accommodate the preferences of different users. They can use either bar or a map to search for desired products and producers. Users can see the producers on the map, zoom in, and see how far the chosen producer is. Thus, they can understand how quick the product delivery is and where to go if they want to pick the products themselves.

Receipts

After the payment is complete, users can download and print receipts. It can help ordinary consumers to keep track of their spending, while businesses that use the app can include receipts in their financial reports.

Rating system

We created a unique algorithm for the rating system inside the farmer marketplace app. Users can rate goods they buy, while products with the biggest rating have higher search positions. Ratings encourage producers to improve the quality of their products, maintain market competition, and help users make their purchase decisions.

Producer app flow

We decided to develop a mobile app for farmers as workers from the food production field sometimes can’t spend much time in front of their computers, while settings may need to be changed quickly.

The farmer mobile app displays a flow completely different from the one presented in user apps. That’s why we formed two different design teams to work with the interfaces of these apps to have applications delivered on time.

With the help of this mobile app, farmers can create and edit their profiles, add new products to the market, manage orders, and add promo codes.

Detailed product information

Noah farmer marketplace app is supposed to display many food categories with different expiration dates and storage conditions. That’s why we tried to add as many details as possible, so users can find out how to store the products they buy and when they expire. The information typed by the farmer can also be seen in the user’s mobile app.

Farmers can add their company logo and photo to raise their brand awareness and build trustful relationships with their customers.

Loyalty programs

Apart from other marketplaces, the Noah app allows sellers to be in full control of prices and discounts. Marketplace admins don’t enforce their price policy and only charge commissions from each purchase. That’s why farmers can edit prices themselves and add discount codes whenever it is convenient.

Admin panel flow

Admin panel enables Noah managers to add new product categories, manage promo codes and gift cards, edit producer and product profiles and manage all the other instances of the app.

The admin panel stores users' and farmers' private information, that’s why we paid extra attention to security. We chose Laravel for admin panel development as it provides tools able to prevent critical security issues like cross-site scripting, SQL injections, and others.

Producer profile settings

The panel enables managers to free farmers from setting up their profiles themselves and focus on food production and ensuring seamless delivery. Noah managers can manually set commissions for each product category, add pick-up days, and check ratings.

Results

Our team managed to accomplish the development of all the apps within 4 months, and, as a result, the Noah farmer marketplace app was released to the market before the harvest season had started and was able to receive high profit.

The team was so satisfied with the result that they decided to continue cooperating with us. That’s why after the first version was released we kept enhancing it with new features and providing post-release support.

Timeline

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THANKS

FOR WATCHING

Ronas.IT

Design & Dev Team

2023