Case Study · Agritech Super-App
Five farm apps,
one home-screen icon.
Sugati.Ag is a smart-farming super-app for Indian farmers. Across 60+ Android & iOS screens, we folded weather, crop knowledge, agri-news, hyperlocal jobs and a seed marketplace into one trusted ritual — designed for dirty thumbs, dropped 4G, and seven regional languages.
Client
Sugati.Ag (Agritech startup)
Industry
Agritech · Rural Commerce
Service
UX/UI · Mobile App Design
Platform
Android-first · iOS
Team
1 Product Designer · PM · 4 Eng
Timeline
14 weeks
The brief
Replace five farmer apps with one trusted home for the entire crop cycle.
The founders had seen farmers juggle a weather app, a mandi-price app, an agri-news app, an e-commerce app for seeds, and a Facebook group for jobs. Sugati.Ag was the promise to absorb all five into one icon — without becoming a confusing bundle.
The challenge
Design for dirty thumbs, dropped 4G and 60-year-old eyes.
Our primary user is over 40, often shares the phone with a son or daughter who installs apps for them, and uses the device outdoors in glare. Every screen had to survive a 56dp tap target, sub-100KB hero images, and total offline tolerance for the crop library.
The outcome
60+ screens. 5 products. One ritual that opens at sunrise.
A warm, photographic super-app that opens to today's weather + advisory, then steps quietly aside. In beta it became the second-most-opened app after WhatsApp for 7 of 12 farmer households we shipped to.
60+
screens across Android & iOS
5
products in one super-app
7
Indian languages supported
1
home-screen icon for the whole farm
Project Timeline
Fourteen weeks — from village field visits to Play Store ready.
01 · Weeks 1–3
Field visits in UP, MP & Rajasthan. Diary studies with 14 farmers.
02 · Weeks 4–6
IA for 5 product surfaces · sketching low-fi flows in Hindi & English.
03 · Weeks 7–11
Hi-fi system, illustrated icon set, 60 screens, low-bandwidth states.
04 · Weeks 12–14
Village usability tests on 2G handsets · polish · dev handoff.
Section 1 · Onboarding
The first three screens earn the right to ask for a phone number.
Splash sets a register — the village skyline farmers know. Login uses Hindi-first copy and accepts phone OTP, Facebook or Google. The verified confetti screen is the only celebratory moment; the rest of the app stays calm. Total cold-start to home: under 35 seconds.
01 · Splash
Logo over windmill + barn — the register before the screen even loads.
02 · Welcome back
Phone OTP first, social login as a fallback for younger users.
03 · Registered
One bright moment of celebration, then a single Get Started.
Section 2 · Four pillars
One bottom bar. Four product surfaces. Zero menu mazes.
Weather
Hyperlocal forecast with sunrise/sunset and a daily 'good day for' advisory aligned to the user's crop cycle.
Crop Knowledge
A tabbed library of soil, seasons, climate, mass-production zones and pesticide guidance — written for farmers, not agronomists.
Seed Marketplace
Buy seeds, machinery and supplies with cash-on-delivery, wishlist and review-led trust signals.
Agri News
Trending agriculture news, policy updates and discoveries — curated, never doom-scrolling.
Section 3 · The Home
A home screen that does the work of five apps in one scroll.
The Home is composed of four bands — weather hero, crop carousel, editorial card and a best-selling-seeds rail. Each band is tappable, each is offline-cached, and each subtly funnels into a different product surface.
Weather-led hero
24°C, sunset, partially cloudy — and the daily advisory: 'Today would be bad day for applying pesticides.'
Crop quick-pick
Horizontally scrollable circles — carrots, lettuce, chickpea, radish, tomato — taps land in the crop knowledge tab.
Editorial card
A medium-term agricultural outlook chart that mixes USDA & EU data — designed to feel like a friendly almanac.
Best-selling seeds
Curated by season + geography. Wishlist heart top-left, price top-right, cash on delivery below the fold.
Section 4 · The ritual
A day in the life of a Sugati.Ag farmer.
Day 0
Splash & onboarding
Sugati.Ag logo over the village skyline — a register every farmer recognises before reading.
Day 0
Welcome back
Phone-OTP-friendly login screen, with Facebook and Google for younger farmers and FPO managers.
Day 1
Good morning, [farmer]
Weather hero in olive-teal · today's pesticide advisory · crop carousel · best-selling seeds.
Day 1
Weather forecast
Sunrise arc and seven-day list — with monsoon warning banner the day landslides spike.
Daily
Crop deep-dive
Tap a crop chip — soil, seasons, climate, mass-production states and pesticide tabs.
Weekly
Earn or order
Pick up a gardener job nearby, or order Barley seed at ₹280 with cash on delivery.
Section 5 · Weather
Weather forecast that knows it's an agricultural decision tool.
The sunrise/sunset arc isn't decoration — it's how farmers think about a workday. Below the arc, an orange warning banner appears the day landslides or floods are likely. Below that, a 7-day forecast list with one-tap drill into agronomic context.
Sowing window for Barley opens this week in your district — soil moisture is optimal.
Three new Gardener jobs near DPS Vaishali Nagar match your saved travel radius of 5 km.
Mandi prices for Wheat in Jaipur rose 4.2% — your saved batch is now worth ₹14,820/quintal.
Heavy rain forecast Wednesday — defer pesticide spray, your last 2 sprays would be washed out.
Section 6 · Crop knowledge
The library a farmer would have kept on the wall — but searchable.
Tabs for Soil, Seasons, Climate, Mass Production and Pesticides. Copy reviewed by an agronomy professor from GBPUAT before shipping. The header crop image is photographic, not 3D — credibility over polish.
Soil
Loamy sand, black soil, clayey loam — descriptive, not Latin.
Seasons
Sowing windows by month and region — the calendar farmers ask for first.
Climate
Rainfall in mm, temperature ceiling — exactly what marginal farmers need to plan irrigation.
Mass production
Top-producing states ranked — instant credibility for unfamiliar crops.
Pesticides
Brand-agnostic active-ingredient guidance — links into the shop only when relevant.
Last updated
A timestamp on every article — a trust signal that costs nothing to add.
Section 7 · Marketplace
"Know more about your crops" —
a shop disguised as a textbook.
The shop entry point is framed as learning, not selling. Cards show a price in saffron, a heart for wishlist, a crop name — and that's it. Tapping the card lands in the crop library, where the buy CTA is the bottom-bar option, not the top one.
Cash on delivery in 80% of pincodes
Price in saffron — the trust colour for Indian commerce
Wishlist heart for crops user wants to try next season
Reviews shown above the fold on every product
Section 8 · Hyperlocal jobs
Finding work that's a tractor-ride away.
The jobs surface borrows nothing from LinkedIn. Search is by locality (no skills filter), salary is shown in ₹/month in green, employer details include a real photo and a phone number. The Apply button opens WhatsApp — because that's where the conversation will happen anyway.
Locality first. Search is geographic, not by skill — that's how the conversation starts.
Real photos. Employer faces — not avatars — sit next to every listing.
WhatsApp apply. Apply opens WhatsApp with a pre-filled message in the local language.
Section 9 · News trend
News that informs decisions —
not the algorithmic kind.
The News tab opens to four chips: All, Trending, Agriculture, Discoveries. The hero carousel surfaces the day's three most important headlines, each with a photographic landscape. Below, a trending list and a longer-form 'Interesting' rail. There is no infinite scroll. The list ends — deliberately — at 20 items.
Curated, not algorithmic
An editor in Pune assembles the daily list — readability over volume.
Photographic, not iconic
Each story leads with a landscape — fields, mandis, machinery.
Length-honest
Every article tells you upload time + read length in minutes.
Similar news
Each article ends with related coverage — the only personalisation in the app.
Section 10 · Principles
Four design rules that ran every decision.
Principle 01
Trust before features
Our user is a 45-year-old farmer with 4G that drops to 2G in monsoon. The first screen had to feel like the trust of a neighbour, not the polish of a startup. We kept colors earthy, imagery photographic, and copy literal.
Principle 02
Five products, one home screen
Weather, crops, shop, news and jobs each behave like full apps elsewhere. We absorbed them into one Home with a weather-led hero, a crop carousel and a 'best-selling seeds' rail — so 80% of intent is one tap away.
Principle 03
Designed for low bandwidth, dirty thumbs
Min tap target 56dp. All hero imagery progressive-jpg under 80KB. Iconography in flat 3D so it's recognisable even when text doesn't render. Offline read-cache for the crop library.
Principle 04
Local languages are first-class
Every label, error and CTA was written first in Hindi, then translated to English. Number formats use the Indian lakh/crore grouping; rupee symbol leads price, not trails it.
Design System
Earth + sprout + a single warm sun.
The palette stays close to the field. Sprout green leads, forest green commits, sun orange is reserved for price and warnings — the two things farmers reach for first.
Ink
#0F1A14
Paper
#F2F6EE
Bone
#E6EEDC
Sprout
#7FBF3F
Forest
#2F7A3C
Sun
#F2A341
Wordmark
Sugati.Ag
Title case, sprout-leaf glyph, the .Ag in forest green — a quiet ownership cue.
Buttons
Forest pill primary. 56dp tap target. Outline secondary. No third level.
Typography
Bold sentence-case titles.
Generous body line-height.
Devanagari paired alongside Latin at every weight — both feel native, never translated.
Voices from beta
The product judged at sunrise.
"Pehle paanch alag apps dekhta tha — mausam, mandi bhav, news, beej, naukri. Ab ek hi Sugati hai. Bahut aaram ho gaya."
Ramesh K.
Wheat & Barley farmer, Jaipur · 7 acres
"The crop knowledge tabs are the most useful thing on my phone after WhatsApp. Even our village agronomist now opens it during demos."
Anjali D.
FPO manager, Madhya Pradesh
Epilogue
What we learned designing Sugati.Ag.
Building a super-app for rural India isn't about cramming. It's about deciding which 20% of each underlying app actually needs to be carried forward, and ruthlessly leaving the rest in the menu marked 'More'. The biggest unlock was admitting that weather, not commerce, is the reason a farmer opens an app at sunrise.
The second unlock was treating WhatsApp as a partner, not a competitor. Every Apply, every Contact employer, every Share crop article routes through WhatsApp — because that's where the trust already lives. Sugati.Ag is the index. WhatsApp is the inbox.
Building for the next billion users? Let's design the trust layer.