DLG CONNECT: An agricultural social network

A project redefining and designing a platform project where people from the same sector with common interests converge

Overview

DLG connect is a platform of DLG, a leading German company in the organization of trade fair events, created with the aim of bringing people with common interests together in one place to create synergies that help them to better integrate into the agricultural sector.

Its main purpose is to act as a forum for conversations, doubts, recommendations, and advice, a place to find the latest news and events and, if necessary, to support a marketplace for materials and machinery.

However, DLG never managed to meet the expectations that had been placed on the platform, so in order to optimize its use and increase the user community, as it was not achieving the desired reach, DLG decided to rethink the entire redesign of the project to find out the reasons that led users to abandon the platform.

OBJECTIVES

Improving product outreach

We conducted interviews and field studies with users in order to understand them better. We discovered that the average user did not relate to the concept of «coffee», a concept created by DLG, which could be translated as «conversational threads», to refer to conversations around the same topic.

To exemplify this, imagine that DLG publishes a news item: if two people post a different comment on the same news item, two coffees would be generated, on which other people could continue to comment, increasing the depth of the conversation.

In a conclusion, we set 4 objectives.

Features redefinition

Reduce and prioritize the functionalities required by the customer in order not to confuse users.

Users levels

Define the user and their level of involvement with the platform to reach everyone.

Easy and responsive design

Redesigning the screens to make them more intuitive, attractive and explanatory in order to help people understand the «cafes».

Branding

Develop a branding around the «DLG Connect» brand that conveys notoriety and seriousness and separates it from its main trade fair.

MOSCOW ANALYSIS

Turning a conversation thread into a cafe

In the previous audit of the platform we found multiple functionalities developed in a very superficial way, so we had to focus on where the product should grow.

Given that we had detected most of the problems for the user in the «coffees», we decided to prioritise the functionalities to help us define them better and draw conclusions about which were the points on which we should start.

Cafe: Make it look like conversations

It is the main and most useful functionality but users don’t quite understand how it works so we should clean it up and simplify it.

The wall: For everything

The idea is to create a space to compile all the information with and order, adding the main topics that the news or conversation is about.

Search & Topics

It should be easy for users to sort the information, so we will give importance to the search bar regardless of what they are looking for.

DEFINE THE USER

Bruno 43, Fráncfort (Germany)

Bruno has been a livestock entrepreneur for 10 years. His star product is wheat, but he is always looking for new products to increase his market presence. He delegates many of the purchasing and administration tasks to his team because he does not have as much time as he would like. He regularly attends trade fairs in search of solutions because he feels that communication in person is more fluid and quicker.

Years’ experience

50,000€

of investment approx

20-30

employees

Bruno’s User journey

With Bruno’s user journey, we can find out his weaknesses in the purchasing process or contact the sector. Thus, we discover that his involvement with the platform at first will be very superficial. As his use progresses in the hands of the rest of his colleagues in the sector, he will gradually deepen his knowledge of the product.

Branding

Build the guidelines for creating a brand

THE SOLUTION

DLG Connect proposal

We simplified the original sitemap to highlight only the main features of the product: News (home), cafes, experiences (media content) and marketplace (functionality to be developed in the future).

On the other hand, we kept the search bar as it is a fundamental element in developing the product. The profile, notifications and settings also

Finally, at the bottom, we proposed a chat to hold private commercial conversations for users with a higher level of involvement

The Wall (Home)

The HOME is the space for news from the user’s point of view: their interests and tastes, being possible to filter the content to find more specific things at a much higher level of depth and involvement with the product.

Likewise, in The Wall, we categorise the news with what we call «topics» that act as hashtags to group all the information according to a criterion known by the user.

Also in the right-hand column, we provide a space for the user’s «favourites» as well as a promotional space for companies.

Cafe: An space for discussing

We tried to simplify the types of «coffees» that a user can have: those created by the user himself as a result of a comment in a news, media or topic of his interest, those recommended according to his tastes and those followed (those in which he is actively participating in the coffee created by someone else).

Taking as a reference the concept of Reddit or Twitter to interact with other users, we created «threads» that helped the user to easily follow the conversation and be able to interact at any time.

Experiences: Don’t miss any event

In this section, we grouped all the content media created in streaming or recorded. We added a filtering system by categories as the main criterion and sub-categories such as dates or types of events to make it easier for the user to search for concrete content.

We also included the client’s requirement which was to have some paid and some free content. This way if the user clicks on paid content they are redirected to a payment gateway.

Search by word is a good option

Finally, we developed a search functionality that is effective individually on its page with different categories but also gives the option to apply it directly on each of the sections of the menu so that if the search is applied on The Wall, the system automatically searches and highlights those words, anywhere on the platform, that refer to the searched content.

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