Origin Group plc is a focused Agri-Services Group. Agrii is a division of Origin Group that itself is a leading agronomy company. It offers independent and innovative advice to arable, fruit and vegetable growers.

The challenge that the project team were presented with was to produce a means for Origin agronomists in the field to be able to retrieve the most up to date risk status for a given weather station against certain pests and diseases. The previous process was a manual one where the reports were prepared by Origin Agronomists in Microsoft Excel. They were then converted to PDFs and distributed over email. This process was both slow and labour intensive as it could take up to a month for the Origin scientists to prepare the reports.

The solution that was agreed upon was a digital application that would provide agronomists the ability to retrieve real-time risk information for various crop pests & diseases.

Having only joined the team after the requirements gathering & research phase had been completed. I was initially brought in to develop the UI’s which had been agreed upon in the high-fidelity mock-ups.

My first action was to meet with the previous UX Consultant to discuss what she had learned through her workshops with the agronomists. We also discussed the customer journey maps that were created and the design decisions that went in to the wireframing of the solution. Once I was happy that I had an overall understanding of what the user’s goals and processes were, I began to develop the UI.

After the first phase was completed Agrii approached the team about a possible pivot. Instead of the two-separate mobile apps, they now wanted a Web App Platform that would function as a portal for their agronomists to access all their digital tools.

To accommodate this pivot new wireframes had to be designed to ensure that we would successfully be able to port the previously developed apps to this portal. However, before I went about designing the wireframes, I had a conversation with the lead agronomist at Agrii about her pros and cons from the previous apps.

One of the main issues that she raised was the separation of the map from the data. These two components were on separate pages and despite being designed to ensure that the users knew which station the data was referring to, the separation was causing frustration.

After talking with the agronomist, I scheduled a meeting with the PM from Agrii to discuss what the business goals of the portal were. I believe that in enterprise UX it is important to realise that every stakeholder in a project should be viewed as a “User”. After this meeting I discovered that scalability of the design was a major factor for the PM. They wanted to be able to add new apps to this portal as their Digital Transformation continued. This meant that my design would have to be scalable and that I would need to provide Style Guidelines to maintain consistency throughout the portal. The PM also mentioned a dashboard that would contain i-frames being the homepage for the agronomists. Despite push back from myself and the solution's architect the i-frames remained and had to be incorporated in to the design. This presented an unexpected design challenge as I had limited control over the i-frames and yet I had to make them feel native to the solution.

Once I was happy that I had gathered all the requirements that were necessary I put together the wireframes for the portal using Balsamiq. These wireframes were accepted, and I was asked to start development without putting together any high-fidelity mock-ups which wasn't ideal but there was a great deal of pressure on the PM to deliver.

This was an extremely agile project as both time & budget constraints lead to a consistent stream of requirement changes. Each change would require a brief redesign to ensure the users were still going to receive a solution that would provide them with the best possible solution. Again, this was not ideal environment to design a scalable and complex system however we managed to deliver a solution that not only pleased the client but also went on to help set world records for crop production.