Problem: Creating a new line of Business for a major Ag-Tech company
Role: Lead UX Architect
Company: Land O Lakes
Date: May-July 2018
Problem: When I was asked to go to Minnesota for two months to work on this project for Land O Lakes I was both inspired and nervous. I had never worked with an Ag-Tech company before and knew nothing about the domain. I soon found out that the team was more than willing to lend me their domain knowledge so we could the the new product launched on time.
The biggest challenge of this project was a lack of understanding on the client side of the difference between UI and UX, and what I was exactly there to do. I did most of my work in a vacuum, but still managed to meet the requirements of the project.
Methodology: I did whatever I could to get the information I needed to get the project done to the best of my ability. Definitely not a traditional project.
User Research: For this project, there were only two user personas. The Land o Lakes growers (Farmers), and the Land O Lakes Sustain team. Both have very different goals and motivations. The Goal of the Land O Lakes team was to promote sustainable farming practices among the co-op’s growers, in order to diminish negative impacts on the environment.
On the other hand, the Growers don’t really have the same ambitions, though our research, we found that they would be more interested in increasing profit and crop Yield. They also did not want to have to spend a lot of time in the system. With was an issue, because we needed to log their farm management techniques in order to generate the scores. We solved this by enlisting the help of Land O Lakes’ Sales team who were usually in direct contact with the growers, and could easily fill out the survey on their behalf.
Information Architecture: Although we only identified two screens for the product, it was still a challenge coming up with the Information architecture. The main stakeholders of the project did not understand that I needed to be in the functional meetings in order to do my part. Since I was barred from the meetings, I had to rely on their data visualization specialist, who took extra time to meet with me, one on one and filled me on the newest requirements.
Interactions/Visual Design: I continued to meet privately with the Land O Lakes data visualization specialist to create mockups for the project. As you can see below, we did quite a few iterations before we got close to the final version of the MVP that launched in October of 2018.
Final Outcome: Launched in October 2018
Information Architecture of Sustain Score Screen. In the early stages of a project, I outline the layout of each screen in Excel, and plan out the hierarchy and functions of each item.
First design from Day 1
Iteration 2
3rd iteration, from end of UX Discovery
Final Truterra UI