How I developed a scalable product and strategy for a growing agriculture startup.
💼 Role: Strategic Consultant, UX Design & Research
🗓️ Dates: Sept 2022 – Jan 2023
👥 Team: CEO/Founder, Product Manager, Lead Engineer, UI Designer
🚀 Stage: Redesign of a v1 product, Discovery to Development
🏢 Client: Hardware+Software AgTech Startup, around 40 employees
Opportunity:
Exploring New Product Strategy to Serve Enterprise Agriculture Organizations
BarnTools is a startup that makes wireless barn alarms for swine and poultry producers. These alarms alert flock and herd managers to unsafe conditions in their barns usually resulting from weather or power outages.
They already have a set of physical sensors and alarms, and a very popular mobile app. However as they grow and expand into more enterprise level markets, they needed a way to manage sensors, alarms, barns, and people at scale. Working with some contracted developers they built a v1 web app that began to run into limitations as they brought on bigger customers. Their customers loved the intuitive experience on the mobile app but struggled to perform basic tasks in the web application. They contracted me to develop a product strategy around providing value to enterprise level producers.
How We Faced It
Conducted semi-structured generative interviews to discover the primary needs and jobs of Broiler/Finishing Managers to gain insights for future product strategy and development.
Produced research report with Jobs Diagram, insights, opportunities and recommendations for future strategy.
Collaborated with team to ideate on potential concept directions. (see picture below)
Visualized top concepts and brought them to customers to validate and prioritize potential solution directions as well as discover adjacent opportunities or concerns.
Created a high visual fidelity prototype with realistic data to conduct usability test on the strongest concept. Compared against current v1 implementation of existing enterprise dashboard.
Old Experience
❌ Information architecture was data based instead of user task based.
❌ Tasks spread across multiple pages
❌ Many actions limited to just visible by internal Customer Success due to poor usability
Proposed Design
✅ Immediately actionable information summar
ized and presented first
✅ Bulk actions available across multiple barns
✅ Mirrors the well received mobile app
High Fidelity Prototype
I delivered a data-rich, interactive, high visual fidelity prototype to test with users and (after revisions from the user testing) guide development. This prototype was built using Figma for UI design and Axure for interactivity.
See video below or experience the prototype yourself here →
User Impact
We tested the prototype with 5 representative users. In addition to gathering insights on specific tasks, we did a pre-test System Usability Scale (SUS) survey to rate the usability of the current site before the test, and then the same SUS survey after on the prototyped experience.
4/5 participants* gave the prototype an average of +5 points higher System Usability score than the current site.
*Remaining participant gave the prototype 5 points lower score, saying that he liked the new prototype but wanted more time to play and get comfortable with it.
