Leveraging Material Design to communicate to Indian Fishermen.
The project was done as part of an Instructional Graphic Design course. The brief of the project was to design a mobile application that simply did just one function for the user group of Indian fishermen. Macchi (meaning fish in Hindi) is an unique application that simply allows Indian fishermen to update their daily catch for the market seller.
The Indian fisherman is an user group that is quite unique and challenging to design for. Although the fishing industry significantly contributes to India's economic growth, Indian fishermen are severely underpaid and a sizable chunk of this class lack proper education.
I conducted a secondary research study that helped me understand why fishermen in India were dealing with poverty.
In the present day scenario, business transactions between fishermen and the market sellers occur through a middle man. Certain case studies observed that a majority of the profit share goes to this middle man, leaving both the fisherman and the market seller with a negligible profit margin.
Hence, my proposal for the app is a scenario where the app tries to bypass the middle man and establishes a direct connection between the fisherman and the market seller.
My research revealed that in order for fishermen to connect to the visual design, the interface needed to be very close to having a physical form rather than being a virtual entity. Given the short time frame, I decided to follow Google's Material Design principles that defines every item of an interface to have the physical form of a piece of paper. However, I tweaked its principles specially when it came to UX guidelines and graphic icon usage to better suit my user group. I defined the colour palette based on colour that the fishermen see on an everyday basis.
Research into fishing revealed that fishermen usually identify a fish by looking at their snout, fin or tail. I focussed on generating wireframes that highlight these features of a fish and make it easy for a fisherman to update his stock. I moved on to iterate further on different UI styles.
