Platform Design for Ag Tech Product Suite
Project Overview
Timeline:
1st Iteration
Mobile & Responsive Web solutions for Farmer Users
Dec 2019 - Aug 2021
Current Iteration
Responsive Web solution for Admin users
Sept 2021 - Present
Human-centric Design Enthusiast
PM, Engineering Lead, 3 engineering squads
Put together requirements with my team
Led user research
Drove human-centric systems thinking in a highly technical space
Created workflow, visual, and interaction design artifacts from low to high fidelity
Presented design artifacts and gathered stakeholder feedback
User Problem
Farmers, their Agriculture Business Partners, and Indigo Ag Admins have complex jobs with a variety of overlapping tasks and goals. Our software tools aim to increase profitability for our users’ businesses by plugging in when and where they’re needed.
Unfortunately, our products were not seamlessly linked to support our customers in reaching their goals.
How might we create a seamless experience across our agriculture products so that our users can access the correct tool at the right time in their season?
Business Problem
We were unable to recognize the same user across different products. This meant these users were having an inconsistent and tedious experience across all of our products. Pain points began to cascade off of this major flaw in our software.
Our products were unscaleable
High internal costs
Poor user experience
1st Iteration - Incremental Improvements
Solution 1: Global Customer Identification
How might we provide a validated, unique, and holistic view of a customer across our entire software platform at Indigo?
Solution 2: Address Management
How might we ask for the correct address at the best time for our users?
Before
After
Second Iteration - Admin Tool MVP
While the incremental improvements helped our users to resolve small pain points, the business recognized the need for strategic change and so Indigo Ag Platform was born.
I had lofty goals to create a global platform where every user could jump into different products seamlessly, but the foundational step was to ensure our admin users could access our platform data and help onboard our customers until they were fully self-service.
Research
Spring 2022 / 15 Participants / Discovery
The goal of this research was to uncover the most important and common goals of our users and what was blocking them or slowing them down. We found:
- Disparate tools across Indigo Ag
- Long drawn-out manual processes
- Many overlapping tasks
Parallel thinking for future & right now
Final Designs
Onboarding Partners & Growers Quickly and Effectively
We introduced the Indigo Admin Tool which was a source of truth for our admins to find and manage our product data. This allowed our admin users to quickly and easily onboard partners and start troubleshooting any customer pain points.
“This will be a game changer for managing users”
Impact & Next Steps
Manual workflows of our internal users went from 2-3 weeks completion time to 3 days. Gone are the days of logging Jira tickets and querying our database to onboard our partner users.
Next up will be simplifying and expanding the platform capabilities for external users including user and account management.