TL;DR:
Redesigned clunky, outdated website to better serve our niche userbase. CA 2021.
Context:
In the agriculture world, seeds – specifically, genetically modified seeds (“GMOs”) – are viewed as technology, and require a signed usage agreement, much like software for your computer. But unlike your computer software, seeds are not connected digitally to the manufacturer, so agreements need to be signed, processed and archived. Handling paper agreements is a cumbersome task for everyone involved. Enter AGDATA’s “AgCelerate” – a website to digitalize and streamline this process.
When AGDATA created the site (ca. 2012), they intentionally attempted to keep the functionality simple: create an account, sign your agreements, log out. No need to over-engineer it. However, they overlooked a small but critical detail: Farmers are not heavy computer users. The differences between a typical farmer (the end-user) and an office worker (the product manager, developers, and client stakeholders who designed it) are stark: farmers are often older, which frequently means weaker fine-motor skills and poorer vision. They are often slower typists, in part because they don’t spend their day on computers. They often struggle to figure out things that appear obvious to the more seasoned web user. They generally don’t want to spend time on a computer.
So while the organization and the clients thought the site was simple and easy to use, the actual users they intended to serve struggled for years on a site that was not designed with them in mind.
AgCelerate is AGDATA’s largest platform: it has over 120,000 unique users and can top 350,000 pageviews per month during the busy season. With this much exposure, it was critical we take care of these users.
Process:
Before we even cracked open a sketchbook, we needed to uncover the real problems. Fortunately, our customer support team had years of documented complaints from users and were able to share plenty of stories. I also got the opportunity to speak with several seed retailers; they’re the ones who often find themselves walking farmers through the registration and signing process. We looked at site performance and analytics, and we did some online surveys of web users for added thoroughness.
We saw a few trends emerge:
1) The registration process was daunting. It was a massive, multi-step process that required no fewer than 20 form fields to be entered. Predictably, users struggled to complete it.
2) Account recovery was just as challenging: users frequently forgot their credentials. This is unsurprising, as most users only visited the site once a year. Many users didn’t even have email addresses – so they had to create one during the account creation process. It’s no wonder they didn’t remember the email address associated with their account! Plus, because of the challenges of recovering an account, users would just create a new, duplicate account.
3) The design of the site was clunky and unforgiving: small text, small buttons and inflexible layouts made the site difficult to read, impossible to scale-up, and un-usable on mobile devices – which farmers rely on heavily.
My first task was to modernize. We needed a fast, responsive website that would work on any device. We also wanted to dramatically simplify and eliminate any confusing clutter: much like a modern e-commerce checkout, I didn’t want anything extraneous to draw users away from the core task.
After that, I needed to tackle the problems of signing up and coming back. We wanted to
1) make it easy to sign up,
2) make it easy to log in,
3) make it harder to forget your credentials.
We did this the following ways:
First, we redesigned the registration flow. We started by asking easy questions (i.e., what’s your name, where do you live) and eliminated some more tricky requirements. And by asking these questions one at a time, we made it feel less daunting and more directed for users who feel like they need their hand held through the process.
If many users don’t have email addresses and they all forget their passwords, we needed to re-think the typical authentication pattern. We opted to leverage one-time codes: users enter their phone number or email address, and we send them a code to enter. It’s basically two-factor authentication or a “forgot password” account recovery – we just removed the initial password component.
In front of all of this, we put a simple mechanism to help users who don’t remember if they’ve been to the site before: The “Login” process and “Registration” process start in the same place. When a user enters a phone number or email address, we search the database for a matching record. If we find it, we proceed with the two-factor style login; if we don’t, we direct them to the registration form. Additionally, we filled the registration from with duplication detection – so if a user enters an email address we don’t have on file but we recognize their address, we can identify their account and help them log in instead of creating a duplicate registration.
Results:
We did a ton of design testing – we reviewed it with farmers, retailers, the customer support team – anyone who was connected to actual users. The overall reception was that it would be a massive improvement; some retailers started pressing on how soon it could be ready! Additionally, some click-testing indicated high performance, specifically for return users
I evaluated the site and our Customer Support call volume after 3 months, and after 12+ months. The results were nothing short of spectacular:
- Registration Success Rate doubled (78.1% vs 37.4%)
- Registrations & Agreement signings increased (14.8% and 7.7%, respectively).
- User Satisfaction ratings grew 33%
- Customer Support Call Volume decreased 50%
(FEB-APR, 2021: 2,255 calls / FEB-APR, 2022: 1,136 calls)
Perhaps most encouraging: the registration and agreement signing numbers went up, while session count went down. Users came, did their work and left, with fewer return visits necessary.