TL;DR:
Added some critical functionality to a legacy platform. Ca. 2023
Context:
Much like in other industries, manufacturers in the agriculture & crop protection chemical industry want to have visibility into the channel and of end-users. They sell their product to distributors, but generally become blind after that. To rectify this, they offer rebates to distributors, retailers and even end-users in exchange for reporting their sales or purchase data.
AgCollect was created ca. 2000 as a data collection tool: retailers log in and submit their sales data, then review it for accuracy so they can receive their rebate. It has seen a few changes over the years, but hadn’t had any UI updates since ca. 2014.
Over the years, satisfaction with the tool waned: the tool was aged and sluggish, with no evidence of improvement. While technology everywhere boomed, AgCollect remained static, causing it to quickly feel outdated. Additionally, users complained about a lack of transparency: they would submit data, but it was unclear when it would be ready for review or how it may have been cleansed or changed.
As an effort to solve the question of data transparency, the team previously created a report that was emailed to submitters. It was bland, but had a number of important metrics aimed at helping users answer their questions about their data. Sadly, this emailed report did very little to help submitters better understand their data, and most users reported that they ignored it.
Process:
After reviewing the site and emailed report, I spoke with Customer Support reps, the data operations team, and a number of submitters. I also extensively reviewed several years’ worth of annual surveys to identify trends and key issues that were noted with regard to transparency.
It was quite clear that the emailed report was simply too busy: it may have had the important information on it, but there was too much text and too little visual hierarchy for it to be helpful. We knew there was an opportunity to improve it. Specifically, we wanted to simplify.
Redesigning the email could be simple enough, but after discussing the needs of the users and the capacity of the development team, we opted to shift the content from the email format to the AgCollect homepage. By default, there was nothing on the homepage, so it made sense to redesign that into something of a “submitter dashboard.”
From there, I took the metrics, reviewed them with submitters, and crafted a simple KPI-based dashboard that would enable users to more quickly see the most important numbers. Our goal was simple: to help users know what they could and should work on.
It’s worth noting how important it was to pass all this through the filter of our submitters. Nearly everyone in our organization assumed we needed certain metrics, like Prior Year data so users could make comparisons. Only after speaking with the retailers did we learn that they didn’t need many of those values at all – they were merely extra noise that contributed to the failure of the past attempts.
Results:
The finished product doesn’t look particularly remarkable – it’s a single page, and it’s a relatively simple design on an otherwise plain platform.
But the feedback was remarkable. Reading our annual survey responses were like reading responses for a totally different product. This one update transformed the product from a burden to a delight: users shifted their average score from 3.0 (out of 5) to 3.6!
Users remarked that the new homepage was beneficial in helping them understand what work to do next, when they could expect their data, and more. Beyond that, they raved that this critical new page made the entire system feel newer, fresher and more user-friendly.