Mobile Rebuild
FarmIQ is the leading provider of farm management software in New Zealand. The software is designed to drive sustainable, productive, and profitable outcomes.
Mobile rebuild was a huge undertaking for FarmIQ. I have been lucky enough to see this project through from initial workshops and ideation, early stages of development & beta testing, to a live product in the hands of our farmers. This is a long-term project that I have contributed to on and off during my time at FarmIQ.
My role
During the inception of the new mobile, I worked with the head of product and lead designer to help define the vision. My primary role has been product designer and researcher within the agile mobile team working alongside a product owner. I have also collaborated with training and content, customer support, and sales and marketing teams.
Although the project is ongoing, I stay involved by reviewing designs and mentoring our junior designer now on the team.
The Problem
The heart of a farmer’s job is working outdoors, making decisions, following plans, and executing these decisions to end up with the best produce whilst taking care of their land and animals. Farming is hands-on, labour-intensive work, yet FarmIQ did not have a solution that met the needs of these farmers in their everyday environment.
Our existing mobile application was clunky, slow, and out of date. This caused a lot of frustration and sometimes meant farmers resorted to recording on paper out on the farm and then re-entering this data into our web application during evenings and breaks.
The Challenge
Our challenge was to replace the current mobile app (now FarmIQ classic) with a new experience that focused on the core of what these farmers want to achieve on their farms. This app would allow fast & easy offline recording, management of pasture and livestock, and provide insights to help with everyday decision-making.
Our Process
As a small team of two designers working across three agile teams, we adopted a Lean UX approach for efficiency. We prioritized collaboration, continuous success measurement, and worked closely with SMEs, POs, and other business areas. We regularly conducted user interviews and testing with farmers and improved our software's analytics tools to better track feature success.
Farms, field days and woolsheds
To better engage with farmers, we immersed ourselves in their environments by hosting workshops in woodsheds, attending national field days, and frequently visiting farms for interviews, user testing, and observations. While we also conducted remote discovery sessions, especially during COVID, these in-person interactions helped strengthen customer relationships and boost morale.
Mobile personas
With input from our Head of Product, we drafted three personas for our app; the Data farmer, the Progressive traditionalist & the Farm Worker. We then went out and conducted interviews and workshops with farmers to validate our assumptions. We iterated and refined the personas until we felt they were accurate and meaningful for the ongoing discovery and development of the app. We continued to revisit these personas every 3-6 months to keep them up to date.
Our personas were especially important for reminding us of the environment our farmers work in. The user interface of our app needed to cater for dirty hands and harsh weather conditions, whilst the functionality needed to consider an offline-first approach to cater for a lot of farms dealing with patchy cell service.
Our Design Principles
As part of a seperate project, I was tasked with creating design principles. Design principles are gounding values and principles that ensure the purpose of the product is manifested through design. They should stem from the vision and purpose of the company and are incredibly important to help guide and shape the decisions we make.
Before starting a design, I include the following in the design file:
Design principles
A summary of customer enhancement requests from Salesforce
Main user roles/personas affected by the feature
Problem and value statement
Main research findings
Hypothesis
Design objectives
This acts as added context to help make design decisions, without having to sift through separate research files.
Diagrams
Due to the complexity of having a large legacy system, there are usually multiple ways of doing one thing, and many sets of rules in place. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems and I find using Figjam to create diagrams a good way to visualise, communicate and map out these systems and user journeys.
I don’t usually bother to make these diagrams look pretty as they are only used internally to foster shared understanding.
Our solution: A map-based farming application
User research revealed that farmers valued the farm map, which was previously just a static image in the classic app. Farmers wanted to interact with the app in relation to their land and animals. We made the map central to data points, adding clickable pins for mobs and paddocks, allowing farmers to record events like health treatments or paddock moves, and view recent activities. This made data recording easier and helped farmers make quick, informed decisions in the context of their farm..
Recording Data
We aim to allow recording data to be as easy as possible for farmers. We ensure our forms are clean and accessible, with large touch areas making it easier for muddy hands. We also pre-populate data when possible, avoiding extra manual entering. This means farmers can spend more time farming and less time entering data, aligning with our principles of ‘Every second counts’ and ‘built for farm life.’
The right data at the right time
While our web application emphasizes complex reporting, we've discovered that most mobile users prefer quick, actionable insights rather than sifting through large amounts of information. They want to access the data that directly supports their day-to-day decision-making while on the go. The classic mobile focused mainly on data entry, leaving farmers feeling like they weren't gaining any real value from the information they provided.
A key focus for us now is delivering concise, visual snippets of valuable data that help farmers make informed decisions more easily.
Success metrics
Stickiness (engagement metric) is at 26% compared to 17% on the classic mobile, which is considered very high for industry standard.
Mob moves (highly used feature) has 270 total daily moves compared to 37 on the classic mobile. This demonstrates the success of utilising the interactive map for this feature.
