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Mani Teja
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009Studio Carbon · 2018

BigHaat

An agritech app for farmers whose first language is neither English nor the interface

A farmer harvesting rice by hand in a paddy field

Summary

Led design for BigHaat's agritech app, built for farmers on low-end devices and intermittent connectivity, prioritising agronomic advice ahead of the transaction.

Role
Design lead
Client
BigHaat
Team
Studio team with client product and agronomy
Timeline
6 months
Platform
Android

My role

I led design working with the studio team, BigHaat's product team and their agronomy specialists, setting the low-end device and intermittent connectivity baseline the whole product was built around.

Impact

Vernacular-first

interface designed around multi-lingual use

Low-end

devices and intermittent connectivity as the design baseline

Context

The baseline is a shared phone on a weak network

The design baseline was a low-end Android device, intermittent connectivity, and a user who may be operating in a language the app was not originally written in.

That single decision, treating the constrained case as the default rather than the exception, reshaped everything from image weight to how product information was structured.

A farmer standing in a flooded rice field at dusk

Decisions

Advice before commerce

Agronomic guidance was placed ahead of the transaction. A farmer arriving with a crop problem gets an answer first and a product recommendation second, tied explicitly to the problem they described.

Product information was restructured around outcome and application rather than chemical composition, which is how the catalogue was organised and not how the decision is made.

Outcome

The principle it left me with

When the stakes are seasonal and irreversible, the interface's job is to reduce the felt risk of the decision, not to accelerate it.