STRATUM

STRATUM is a progressive web application built on Amazon Web Sevices designed to help farmers manage their farm business. Within this application a farmer could see the grain prices being offered near him and how long he could expect to wait in line as well as keep track of all his scale tickets (receipts) across every location to which he delivered.

Challenge

Today's farmer spends a large amount of time managing paperwork and backend business needs leaving less time for growing crops. Each time a farmer delivers grain he gets a receipt. Over time these receipts are scattered in the visors of several farm vehicles. When it comes time to reconcile with all the various vendors the farmer must do an actual scavenger hunt to assemble all the receipts.

Solution

STRATUM aims to get farmers out of the office by consolidating physical paperwork into a mobile platform. Additionally by having all this information in one place we can harness the power of predictive analytics to help farmers maximize profits and reduce wait times.

I wanted to make sure we thought about the end user from the very beginning. I began by gathering product managers, business analysts and the UX team to create journey maps focusing on some of the main tasks farmers and elevator owners would be looking to complete with our application. Our journey map (above) shows the main tasks of an elevator owner (or admin). At the end of this session we assigned obstacle to a team member for further investigation.

Another early step in the design process was to take the requirements documents and convert them into visual mockups. I started with paper and pencil (above) so that I could meet frequently with the product managers and quickly iterate through ideas until we felt we reached something that met both the business and end users needs.

When we reached a point where we felt we were all in agreement with what we had drawn on paper I began to create a higher fidelity prototype in Adobe XD (above). At this stage I was able to get feedback from our executive team and our developers. Being able to click through the screens gave everyone a real sense of what we were building and see gaps we may have otherwise missed.

With the Adobe XD prototype I was able to conduct a remote usability study with 10 of our Farmers. I met with each of them individually over a web conference and asked them to complete a number of tasks focused around finding Cash Bids, reading Scale Tickets and getting Market information. I was able to give them control of the mouse and they were able to actually click through as though they were using the real application. One important thing we learned from this study was that farmers don't take a linear path when looking at bids as we had previously thought. They want to be able to compare bids and jump back and forth between several before making any commitments. Armed with that knowledge we changed the flow of searching on the map.

One of the last steps in this project was adding in the branding. We created a Design System in Figma (and a corresponding styleguide in Confluence for the developers) which allowed us to quickly make global changes to each of the project files and ensure that the developers had all the assets they needed to bring the ideas to life in their code.

Result

Through an iterative process and regular contact with users I was able to create a product that addressed the most frustrating and time consuming parts of farming, giving farmers more time to spend in the fields and with their families.

Methods & Tools Used

• Journey Mapping

• Prototyping

• Comparative Analysis

• Remote Usability Testing

• Surveys

• Focus Groups

• Card Sort

• Expert Interviews

• Figma

• Adobe XD

• Usability Hub

• Optimal Sort

• Miro