Project - Client Hierarchy
Overview
Yara International SA
Yara International is a company that produces fertilizers and create solutions to farmers around the world, helping them to better manage their crop’s development and growth and to cope with climate changes. Based in Norwegian is present in several countries.
Ayra is a digital tool that creates a nutritional plan base on a soil analyses.
This tool identify soil deficiency and create a plan to increase productivity.
My Role
UX/UI Designer - User Research, Prototyping & Testing, User Interface.
Tools Figma, Miro, Teams, Jira and Confluence.
The Problem
Yara wished to expand business to US and Canada market.
However we did not have information about size of the farms and fields. This is crucial to provide assistance in agriculture.
Besides that, once the user created a nutritional plan, this document would be seated in a list and overtime the list become quite long.
It was very difficult for the user to find and organize client's information and documentation inside of this tool and Yara was constantly losing data.
User Research
I planned a research and elaborate a briefing with questions to interview six users of each country, Brazil, Canada and US. My main focus was to find out the following;
Understand the process of working and organizing documents and clients of each user.
Look for possible differences that could be a blocker or impact the design solution of not working in some of the Countries.
Differences in agriculture, procedures and culture.
Qualitative Interviews
The interviews was really important to understand the pain points and user needs, also to give me insights of how to design a solution that would solve the problems and also bring value for all the users in the 03 countries.
"We are very busy, we don't have time to be filling in a system with lots of information, we need something simple and easy, our focus is to be on the road visiting the Farmers".
''Would be great to have one single tool where I could organize all my client's information, but it needs to be quickly process, as I deal with high volume of soil analyses and nutritional plan."
"Every time someone from the team leaves Yara, we lose data info, but have the history of the Farms and Fields is really important for the success and the productive of this Farm".
Insights
"Simplicity was the most important value for the user".
"All Farms are divided in fields, and each field have unique documentation, therefore I needed to build a structure that follow this same organization."
“The history of the Farm would make all the difference for the users, it was a priority to keep all the history organized in one section".
"I realized that besides all differences between regions, the working process of the users was the same".
"I identify difficulties to visualize in the tool the crop grown stage correctly to apply the fertilizer accurately, so that I decided to create illustrations based on pictures".
"Brazil have 02 harvest annually, while US and CA have 01 harvest, that impact the volume of documentation".
The Solution
I designed a simple flow to the user quickly register his client, add a Farm and fields, and have in one section a structure for the keep all farms documentation very organize and easy to access any time.
Usability Tests
I tested the flows in two rounds with 06 users of each country, I collects amazing feedbacks and I validades that the solutions was going to work well in the 03 countries despite all differences. After a few alignments with stakeholders, product team and engineering, this are the final results.
Simple and Safe
A straight forward flow to register a client quickly in 2 steps, inside of safe structure to keep all info and stop losing data.
Data gathering
The informations about size of Farms are requested in the form, therefore we were able to collect data necessary to work in US and Canada.
Organization
A structure organized and the same way that Farms function, in this page the user have access to the Farm and every field with its documentation history separated, and search filters help the user to locate information easily.
Grown stages illustrations
Illustration of the plant grown stage to identify the stages accurately. In order to apply the fertilizer in the correct period of time and optimize results.
Results
Quick acceptance of the tool by users in US and CA.
Gathering of necessary data regarding size of Farms/Fields to increase sales in US and CA Market.
1,903 Nutritional plans were created in March 2023, out of which 40.5% in Brazil (771).
Ayra was the tool used in 67% of all plans created (1268) by 231 users.
0% Data Loss (when the user leaves Yara, all information are safe and goes to the manager of the Region.
Yara Monthly Report - Feb/23 - Mar/23
Project learnings
Simplicity is a great value
The level of complexity of a tool can directly impact the user's decision to accept this tool or not, the user takes into account the learning curve and the time needed to use the tool on a daily basis. Therefore, being able to design a tool that is easy and simple to use is a plus for designers.
Balance
Empathy
In this project I had the opportunity to learn how to balance the business goals and user needs, I also improved my negotiation and presentation skills.
The ability to listen and draw information from users, understanding their pain points and motivation is crucial in designing a tool that really brings value and solve problems.