Extensive and strategic investments are needed to adapt African agriculture to climate change. In 2020, US$2.8 billion were committed to adaptation in the agriculture, forestry and land use sector¹. This figure is likely to rise as the public and private sectors focus efforts on national commitments towards the Paris Agreement (the so-called Paris Alignment) and all African countries prioritize agricultural adaptation².

These shortcomings highlight an opportunity for the agricultural adaptation community to draw lessons from other sectors. The first is ensuring that DSTs are highly tailored to users’ needs, norms and capacities⁵. Many current designs suggest developers have incomplete information about decision-makers’ tasks, problems and expectations around data accuracy and visualization. For example, adaptation DSTs tend to favour sophisticated graphs, indices and maps over simple tables. Yet, it is the simple tables that decision-makers often need. Adopting strategies from software development to enhance user experience — including formulating user personas, diagramming user journeys, and early and on-going user testing — may help. Indeed, explicit sections to gather detailed user feedback about DST components are uncommon, as are iterative updates and releases. Creation of continuous feedback would help design with an awareness of users’ digital fluency and patterns surrounding technology use, ensuring that DSTs cater to the ways individuals interact with digital tools. In Africa, for example, users are most likely to access DSTs via mobile phone- and tablet-compliant websites and apps. Continuous user engagement and feature improvement inherently demands development of business models for platform sustainability, which is often neglected. The Global Yield Gap Atlas is a prominent example towards sustainably serving commercial and non-profit users. Embracing these user-oriented strategies, however, will also require building specific required skillsets, often missing, in agricultural and/or meteorological research organizations.

非洲农业需要广泛的战略投资来适应气候变化。2020 年，承诺投入 28 亿美元用于农业、林业和土地利用部门的适应¹。随着公共和私营部门将重点放在对《巴黎协定》（所谓的《巴黎联盟》）的国家承诺上以及所有非洲国家优先考虑农业适应²上，这一数字可能会上升。

这些缺点凸显了农业适应界从其他部门吸取经验教训的机会。首先是确保 DST 高度适合用户的需求、规范和能力⁵。当前的许多设计表明，开发人员对决策者的任务、问题以及数据准确性和可视化期望的信息不完整。例如，适应 DST 倾向于使用复杂的图表、索引和地图，而不是简单的表格。然而，决策者通常需要的是简单的表格。采用软件开发策略来增强用户体验——包括制定用户角色、绘制用户旅程图以及早期和持续的用户测试——可能会有所帮助。事实上，收集有关 DST 组件的详细用户反馈的明确部分并不常见，迭代更新和发布也是如此。创建持续反馈将有助于设计时了解用户的数字流畅度和技术使用模式，确保 DST 满足个人与数字工具交互的方式。例如，在非洲，用户最有可能通过手机和平板电脑兼容的网站和应用程序访问 DST。持续的用户参与和功能改进本质上需要开发平台可持续性的商业模式，而这一点常常被忽视。全球产量差距图集是可持续服务商业和非营利用户的一个突出例子。然而，采用这些以用户为导向的策略还需要建立农业和/或气象研究组织中经常缺失的特定所需技能。