Redesign da interação da ferramenta AGRIEXT com uso de design participativo para apoiar a agricultura irrigada

Abstract

Water consumption in irrigated agriculture is one of the largest in Brazil and its economy in this sector is one of the main challenges for its sustainable use. As a way of supporting this challenge, the AgriExt tool was developed, which calculates the required amount of water for a given crop. However, the interface of this tool is composed of quite technical elements, which hinder its use by the target users. Thus, the aim of this paper is to improve the AgriExt tool and make it accessible. For this, the Participatory Design methodology was used, which adds users within the development phases to perform the interaction improvement of an interactive system. Participants in the study were farmers in the region and the Rural Farmers Association of Quixadá. It can be noticed that the tool needs to have a mobile version, since the smartphone is the only computational device accessible to this public. The test of observation showed that the application still needs to be improved in order to be accessible to users who do not have computational or technological devices, as well as to the illiterate.