Keeping track of your stock
The FarmIQ Stock list is a summary of all your animals and is vital to keeping track of how many animals are on farm. The Stock list feeds into a reconciliation used for accounting purposes and therefore animal numbers (tallies) must be kept up to date.
My role
I assumed responsibility for this project from our lead designer, who had completed the discovery phase and initial wireframes. My role included managing the design process, conducting usability testing, and overseeing the implementation with the web team, which consisted of three developers and two testers. The project was scheduled to be completed within a 12-14 week timeframe.
The Problem
Farmers were not getting value out of the existing Stock list. It’s limited functionality and poor user experience meant that maintaining an accurate, up-to-date account of stock on farm was difficult.
Feedback from farmers indicated that a major reason for outdated stock numbers was that changing stock numbers weren’t driven from where the numbers are viewed - the Stock list. Updating stock numbers took longer and felt harder than it should be, so often wasn’t done. Because of this, it was easy for stock numbers to get out of date and not reflect the actual situation on farm.
The Challenge
The challenge was to rebuild the Stock list with an enhanced user experience. We wanted to enable recording animal activities directly from the Stock list to make it easier to update tallies. We also wanted to display more valuable data and information about the animals so that farmers could easily scan the list to compare stock and make decisions.
Usability testing
We completed task-based moderated usability testing on the Stock list and mob history designs with 5 different farmers with varying roles, farm sizes and farm types.
Actionable insights:
Further emphasis was needed on whether a mob is in withholding (time that must pass before animals can be milked or slaughtered) so that farmers know when it is safe to sell, milk or send these animals to the processor.
Changed the pie chart to a line graph to show the animal tally on mob history so that farmers know when animals came into and left the mob.
Added the scale back into the smaller version of the graphs on mob history.
Farmers don’t like too much change of the interface at once. Based on this we decided to push out the release of the mob history from the stock list.
The Solution
A new and improved stock list with cleaner UI and additional sortable columns displaying important animal data, and making it easy to compare across mobs. This information is filterable and sortable so that farmers can target specific mobs based on what they care about, such as how they are performing or whether they are due for a treatment.
Farmers can select one or more mobs, and perform a treatment or activity without needing to leave the context of the animals.
Mob history
Tracking the history of a mob and monitoring all events affecting the animals is crucial for performance, compliance, and planning. As part of this project, we replaced the outdated and underutilized mob history report with a new, user-friendly interface. The updated report includes more informative graphs and data points, and it is now accessible from multiple locations where farmers view their animals, such as the map, stock list, and reports dashboard.
Success measures
Mob history had a 30% increase in use within the first 3 months and is now the most used report on the web application (out of 20+ reports.)