Journal
IEEE ACCESS
Volume 9, Issue -, Pages 82909-82929Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3085982
Keywords
Blockchain; User interfaces; Supply chains; Agriculture; Safety; Peer-to-peer computing; Stakeholders; Blockchain; food; literature review; supply chain; traceability; user interface
Categories
Funding
- National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC)
- National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), Thailand
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This study examines the application of blockchain technology in the agri-food supply chain from a user interface perspective. The research reveals a lack of user interface design details in current blockchain applications, potentially leading to usability issues. Additionally, the level of user involvement in evaluation in blockchain research is lower compared to non-blockchain research, which could impact the usability of applications.
Blockchain technology is a secure distributed ledger for lists of transactions, which has immense potential to solve traditional agri-food supply chain issues. An increasing number of research on blockchain-based traceability applications aims to improve food quality and safety. Still, relatively few works considered user interfaces when developing and reporting their applications, which could lead to usability issues. This paper aims to address this gap by reviewing existing works from user interface perspectives. We gathered 25 review papers on blockchain or agri-food supply chain and 39 research papers that presented screenshots of user interfaces of related applications. We first reviewed 7 review papers that focused on the blockchain-based agri-food supply chain to understand the benefits and challenges in the blockchain applications. We then analyzed 14 blockchain-based agri-food traceability applications and 10 non-blockchain-based agri-food traceability applications. The analysis resulted in categorizations of 5 target user groups, 3 main approaches for collecting data, 5 main approaches for visualizing data, and a discussion of other aspects of user interfaces. However, we found insufficient details and discussions on the user interfaces and design decisions of the applications for further usability assessment. Additionally, user involvement for evaluation is lower in blockchain-based researches than in non-blockchain-based researches. This trend could lead to usability problems of blockchain applications, causing blockchain technology to be underutilized. Finally, we discussed research gaps and future research directions related to user interface design, which should be addressed to ease future blockchain adoption.
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