Rearrangement of a Livestock Menu to Increase User Access to Desired Content (ATA Experiment 112)

PxD is partnering with Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) to help improve the effectiveness of their voice-based mobile advisory service, the 8028 hotline, by conducting continuous iterations and experiments, as well as by making suggestions for improvements to and customization of the service. The service has millions of registered farmers and represents the first in Africa to be maintained by a government entity at such a large scale.

The livestock content was prepared and launched through the 8028 hotline in May 2020. The livestock content and the menu were structured as Dairy (first menu), Fattening (second menu), Small-Scale [commercial] Poultry (third menu), Improved Household Poultry (fourth menu), and Apiculture (fifth menu). Based on our exploration of user experience, we hypothesized that callers were likely choosing menu options based on the arrangement of the menu items instead of their desired content. Dairy was the most frequently selected menu option, followed by Fattening, then Small-Scale [commercial] Poultry, Improved Household Poultry, and Apiculture. However, our user base’s farming activities indicate that the majority of these poultry farmers engage in household production, not small-scale commercial production.

In this experiment, we aimed to help users, specifically poultry farmers, reach their desired content more easily. We randomly assigned users who selected the Livestock menu to either a control group with no changes to the Livestock menu options or to the treatment group with the two poultry menu options as sub-menus under a new Poultry menu. We find the gap between selecting Small-Scale [commercial] and Improved Household Poultry menu options significantly narrowed in the treatment group, thus aligning more closely with production-activity patterns in our user base.