Three days with the growers of the Mitidja
What a notebook reveals about how a farming app is really used: the signal, the light, the gloves, and the moment a phone comes out of a pocket.
By Nabatic product team
We spent three days on vegetable farms in the Mitidja plain, watching people use FITO without helping them. Here is what we brought back.
The phone comes out twice, not three times
We pictured usage spread across the day. In reality the app opens early in the morning, during the walk round the plot before the heat, and again in the evening under the shed, to read replies.
In between, the phone stays in a pocket. Any notification sent at 1 p.m. is read at 7 p.m. — so it may as well be sent at 7 p.m.
The photo gets taken with gloves on
Nobody takes their gloves off to photograph a leaf. That changes everything about the interface: tap targets under forty-four pixels are missed one time in three, and a pinch gesture to zoom is close to impossible.
We enlarged the shutter and replaced zoom with a fixed framing guide. The share of photos usable on the first try went from 61 to 88 %.
The signal is not absent, it flickers
We had designed a binary offline mode: connected, or not. Reality is a signal that wavers — two bars under the shed, nothing at the back of the greenhouse, fine near the road.
A photo that fails to send and shows an error is experienced as lost work. We changed the model: the diagnosis is composed offline, queued, and sends itself when the signal returns. The farmer has nothing left to watch.
Midday light is a trap
Photos taken between noon and 3 p.m. are overexposed and flatten contrast: an oily patch becomes invisible. We now show a discreet reminder when measured brightness passes a threshold, with one simple instruction — stand so your own body shades the leaf.
What we stopped believing
That farmers want charts. They want a name, a dose and a date.
That multilingual support is a setting. On the same farm, the father reads Arabic, the son reads French, the worker neither. Language gets switched mid-session, not once at install.
That nobody cares about history. It is the most consulted screen after the diagnosis itself: “what did we put on this plot last year?”
- #field
- #usage
- #design
