CONSERVIS / Perennials
Conservis serves over $8 billion in land, equipment, and crop assets at all stages of production. Perennials is a transportation & operational management tool that helps field workers communicate with their farm office. It was the pivotal expansion of the company into the "cash crops" - permanent fruit and nuts trees like avocados, peaches & walnuts.
Since it was a small team, I had a chance to put on many hats. I worked as both UX and Dev on this project. I designed the mobile app and farm office site in collaboration with a 3rd party creative director, and picked up my first research experience. As a part of the engineering team, I coded front end for the farm office website, designed database upgrades & coded APIs in Java, and also support the product team in writing user stories. This showcase is to highlight the UX work I did on the team.
Work order
There are two main personas for the project - the back office manager and the farm hands. Work Order serves the manager in managing the operations in real-time without having to leave the office. For example, for “harvest” operations, the manager can see each truck’s transport status in real time.
The manager can also create a work order, build a task list, and push to their operators in real time.
MOBILE APP design
The journey of the mobile users have unique pain points: language barriers, cell signal limitation, unfamiliarity with operational documentation, and usage in-transit.
So we made the design as simple as possible - and work flow straight forward and close to the user’s mental model.
The most complex part of the design was the work flows for off-line uploads and push notification reminders, that I taught me a lot about UX for native mobile apps.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
The core of the application is a data entry system. So, my design was focused on making the data organized cleanly.
I collaborated with Conservis’ solution architect for creation of new business concept, and ran a cart sort exercise to organize concepts. A Work Order is broken down into Tasks in an Ordered List, essentially creating a step by step instruction list for farm workers.
Then, I designed the Work Order page in a way that closely match the mental model of how customers would go about creating one on physical paper.
FIRST STEPS INTO RESEARCH
As a part of the project, I conducted guerrilla user testing with proof of concept. Standing in the fields with users as they interact with the app, struggling with work gloves and cell signal, I gained so much empathy for the customers. I identified pain points I would not have seen in the office, and learn the importance of UX research.
RESULT
I learned a lot in the project and picked up valuable UX skills. This project gave me the confidence to give up coding in pursuit of UX design.
UI-UX Design / Graphic Design / Responsive / Native Mobile