TL;DR:
Collaborative tool aimed at providing agriculture retailers with increased visibility into their customer’s fields, enabling increased sales opportunities and better farm performance.
Context:
Agriculture retail is a highly competitive space: their addressable market is small and shrinking, it runs on razor thin margins, and their customers are subject to much unpredictability. In general, farmers care about yield and the costs associated with it: they want to grow as much as possible with as few expenses as possible.
Growing as much as possible, of course, is much more than a matter of planting and watering. There are numerous factors to consider: temperatures, rainfall, weed and pest pressure, soil nutrients and more. With the average U.S. farm being more than 400 acres, it’s nearly impossible for a farmer to maintain a watchful eye over fields while proactively improving their crops.
Process
Our organization specializes in data collection and management; we partnered with a an organization that specializes in crop recognition via satellite imagery (“NDVI”). We set about leveraging both strengths to build a tool to help retailers proactively watch their customer’s fields. The proposed benefit to retailers was simple: it will help agronomists sell more. It will help them through proactive, smart recommendations that will benefit the farmer.
Once we understood the opportunity and primary user persona, we set about considering how the typical user flow might work: how would an agronomist use the tool? How would we help them be proactive?
From there, we began sketching out some simple layouts with the proposed functionality. Once we had a rough design, we refined it a few times. I primary leveraged low-fidelity mockups, as our initial intent was to piggyback on our partner’s existing software: while I was lead designer, their dev team would be the ones building it.
The flow was relatively straightforward: we had an overview page that featured an aerial view of their region, with their customer’s fields highlighted. We added some other helpful elements, such as current commodity pricing and a ranking system to help users evaluate their best sales opportunities.
Selecting a field would take you to the field view, which was the meat of the application. Much of the functionality had a prior baseline in our partner’s software, though we were able to group it more logically and present it in clear, actionable manner. The page evolved some as the features became fleshed out, with key features including:
- The field name & any available information about the farmer
- An aerial view of the field
- The NDVI chart with several benchmarks
- Expandable sections for each phase of a growing season
- Product data, including important label information
- Estimated ROI calculations
- Integrations to Agronomist tools to enable seamless ordering
Result:
After providing mockups, we had several review sessions with the developers and ultimately arrived at a prototype everyone was really excited about.
Unfortunately, a series of snags delayed our selling process – including the COVID-19 crisis, among other factors – so our sales team was unable to get moving with the prototype in time for the current season. Beta testing is expected to begin as soon as possible.