A breakthrough means nothing until it reaches the people who can act on it.
Kisan Sarathi’s Agriculture Advisory Management System (AAMS) is a centralised digital platform that turns research knowledge into timely, location-specific advice for India’s farmers. Designed for scale and localisation, AAMS lets ICAR, ATARIs, SAUs, and KVKs create, verify, customise, and publish hyper-contextual advisories across four domains—agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, and fisheries. Deep integration with the flagship Kisan Sarathi 2.0 ecosystem delivers every advisory through web, mobile, and SMS, closing the last-mile gap between laboratories and fields.
I was brought on as the Lead UX Designer and Researcher for Kisan Sarathi AAMS, representing UX4G. I led the end-to-end user research, delivered development-ready design assets, and designed persona-driven UX solutions for the three primary user groups that define the AAMS ecosystem—Content Creator, Content Approver, and Content Customizer.
Feb 2024 - Oct 2024
UX Lead - Research, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Visual Design
Kisan Sarathi
(ICAR - Indian Council of Agricultural Research)
ICAR SPOCs
CTO - Digital India Corporation
UX4G Team
India’s 150 million farmers operate in a landscape of shifting rainfall, pest outbreaks, and volatile markets. Paradoxically, the country also hosts one of the world’s largest agri-research networks: ICAR institutes, State Agricultural Universities, ATARIs, and 700+ KVKs.
Yet most knowledge stops at the gates of these institutions. Advisory letters circulate on paper, translations arrive months late, and overlapping workflows lead to duplicated—or contradictory—recommendations. The result: farmers make critical decisions without timely, localised insight.
The Agriculture Advisory Management System (AAMS) was conceived to facilitate the creation, customization, and distribution of agricultural advice tailored to the needs of farmers. By leveraging technology, AAMS aims to streamline agricultural extension services, ensuring timely, season-specific, and location-based advisories reach farmers through multiple communication channels, such as SMS, mobile apps, and web-based platforms.
AAMS caters to several distinct user groups, each contributing to the system's success. Each user type has a specific role in ensuring the effectiveness of the system, including content creation, approval, and customization.
Content Creators (e.g., Scientists, Faculties, and Researchers from ICAR, SAU/CAU, and KVKs): These users are responsible for creating and submitting advisory content based on their research and regional expertise.
Content Approvers (e.g., Domain Leads, Nodal Officers): They review and approve content to ensure accuracy, relevance, and compliance with agricultural standards.
Content Customizers (e.g., KVK Experts): After content approval, these users adapt the content to meet local conditions, including translating it into regional languages and modifying it to suit local agricultural practices.
While AAMS presents a robust solution, several challenges had to be overcome to ensure its success:
Content integrity: Each advisory had to be version-controlled, traceable to its author, and automatically checked for near-duplicate text before publication.
Seamless localization: India’s linguistic and agro-climatic diversity demanded built-in translation and dose-conversion tools, so Content Customizers could adapt advice without copy-paste work-arounds.
Multi-channel reach: The platform needed to publish once and deliver everywhere—web, Android/iOS, and fallback SMS—so farmers with basic phones were never left out.
Actionable feedback loops: Delivery logs and read metrics had to flow back to scientists and planners, closing the season-to-season learning gap.
The flow opens with a card grid of the four master domains—Agriculture, Horticulture, Animal Husbandry, Fisheries. On selection, a contextual list of sub-domains slides out, prompting a precise choice (for example, Pulses or Oilseeds). This progressive reveal keeps the screen uncluttered and ensures clean downstream metadata.
With the sub-domain locked, the wizard presents a visual catalogue of commodities relevant to that category. Multiple selections are allowed when guidance covers more than one crop or breed, and an “Other” field lets users surface missing items for inclusion in the central dictionary.
The next panel gathers the factual scaffold: a concise title, a short overview, optional media uploads, geo-targeting (state, district), season, and an applicable period tied to the crop calendar. Capturing these elements upfront drives accurate search results and aligns the advice with farmers’ decision windows.
Finally, authors expand on conditions, symptoms, and step-by-step actions. Rich-text bullets, locked unit tokens, and keyword tagging combine to keep language clear while boosting discoverability. Completing this section leads to a preview state where the draft can be saved or sent for approval.
Drafts live in My Content › Drafts until the creator clicks Submit for approval. A quick collaborator picker lets co-authors join and get status pings automatically, dropping email loops and keeping edits in one place.
Once the approver toggles Published, the system snapshots the conversation, locking it as a permanent audit trail—crucial for institutional accountability and future training.
Publishing locks a snapshot; any major change spawns v2 and re-enters approval while the live copy remains public. A side panel lists restore points with one-click rollback, giving researchers freedom to iterate without losing traceability.
The “My Content” workspace gives each creator a single, organized view of every advisory they own. From drafts to published content pieces, along with key signals that show how each piece is performing in the field.
The content-creator uses a side-drawer filter to slice their list down to the essentials. Date range, advisory type, workflow status, KVK reach, farmer reach, satisfaction score and location can be mixed and matched, then stored as reusable presets
Inside each published advisory, the Analytics view shows KVKs reached, farmers referred, and satisfaction rate, plus a geo heat-map that highlights adoption hotspots. A right-rail leaderboard compares the advisory’s score to the creator’s other content, sparking friendly competition.
At portfolio level, the Dashboard aggregates metrics across all outputs, offers time-range toggles (24 h to 12 months), and supports PDF/CSV export.
A domain-structured discussion board where creators, approvers, and customisers swap data, request peer reviews, and coordinate joint advisories. By housing these conversations inside AAMS, institutional knowledge stays searchable and tied to each published insight.
The first screen an approver sees offers both reassurance and focus. Three micro-dashboards track total items reviewed, average review time, and approval rate, so you always know whether you’re ahead of, or slipping behind, your monthly targets. Directly underneath, collapsible panels surface every piece of content in the queue—pending, in-progress, and recently closed—so nothing disappears into pagination or email threads.
This list view consolidates every submission assigned to the approver. Four tabs—Pending approvals, Ongoing approvals, Approved, and Rejected—let the approver locate any advisory instantly, open its detail page, or copy a share-link for further discussion.
While inspecting an advisory, the approver can click "+ Remark" beside any field. Each note is added to a running “remark slip” docked at the bottom of the page. When the slip is sent, the system records the comments, flips the status to Revision required, and notifies the creator.
Every resubmission from the creator is stored as a discrete version. The approver can preview drafts alongside the currently published copy, compare changes, restore an older version if needed, or approve the latest draft directly from this timeline.
A time-stamped conversation thread under the Review tab captures all informal dialogue between creator and approver—clarifications, follow-up questions, or status changes—providing a complete audit trail inside the advisory itself.
A personal analytics dashboard aggregates performance data for content that has passed through the approver’s queue—KVKs reached, farmers referred, satisfaction rate, and throughput metrics. A built-in report generator exports these insights - identical to the report-generation workflow already shown under Content Creator (1.7).
The customizer lands on a personal homescreen that rolls up total items customized, farmers reached, and average turnaround time. Two action tiles: Customise content and Farmer Feedback - jump straight to the day’s work, while the Recently added list surfaces brand-new advisories that may need localisation.
All content is funnelled into five tidy buckets—New, Open, Draft, Customised, Archived—so a KVK expert can move pieces from discovery through publication without losing context. Badge counts and colour-coded chips make it obvious which drafts still need edits and which customised advisories are live in the field.
Inside any published advisory, every field- from title to dosage tables, can be edited in place. A built-in translation area accelerates conversion to local languages, and each change is logged instantly in the Changelog.
Once satisfied, the expert hits Publish (Customised) to create a farmer-ready variant that no longer affects the original advice.
Every save, draft, and published variant is stacked chronologically. One-click preview opens the full text; Restore swaps any previous version back into the editor. This protects against over-editing and lets the customizer revert to the original wording after field trials.
Four views—Content-wise, All Feedback, Flagged, Analysis—tie real farmer responses to each customised item. Up-votes highlight what resonates; down-votes flag confusing advice; the Flagged tab isolates anything requiring urgent correction before the next advisory push.
Dashboards convert raw referral counts and satisfaction percentages into clear gauges and heat maps, pinpointing high-impact blocks or under-performing commodities. A single Generate report button exports these insights for institutional review - as shown in Content Creator(1.7).
The brief was simple but ambitious: turn years of specialized agricultural research into everyday gains for those who work the land.
To achieve that, AAMS gives each contributor—researcher, subject expert, and KVK expert—the same caliber of tooling a modern content platform offers:
The portal should work like a living network where India’s research depth meets the field’s real-time realities, ensuring that every season, every advisory, and every farmer moves one step closer to better yield, lower risk, and informed decision-making.
The portal should work a living network where India’s research depth meets the field’s real-time realities, ensuring that every season, every advisory, and every farmer moves one step closer to better yield, lower risk, and informed decision-making.
