I've been living on a farm in Mozambique for the past week to get to know our users for InGrower. My cofounder has been working here for 5 years. But still, the fact that I'm a product lead whom knows almost nothing about the lives of our users outside the context of our product trouble me. Soon after starting our alpha trial last month, I informed our team that I'm going over for user research.

Immersion is one of several ways to get to know your users. According to IDEO,

The Inspiration phase is dedicated to hearing the voices and understanding the lives of the people you’re designing for. The best route to gaining that understanding is to talk to them in person, where they live, work, and lead their lives. Once you’re in-context, there are lots of ways to observe the people you’re designing for. Spend a day shadowing them, have them walk you through how they make decisions, play fly on the wall and observe them as they cook, socialize, visit the doctor—whatever is relevant to your challenge.

The insight here is that a product doesn't operate in a vacuum. To build a product that our users would love, I need to understand who they are, what motivates them, what keeps them up at night. So that we deliver a product built for them for their lives in Mozambique and not what I assume to be while living in Boston or Copenhagen.

One of the many things that I learned here is that our users have a high tolerance for bad user interface. If they want something, they'll make it work. The big question for us then is creating something of tangible value to them. Having shadowed and spoken to a handful of local smallholding farmers, I think I have a better sense of what that actually means.

This is our makeshift kitchen that my housemates assembled. Everything here are hacked together in one way or another.