Defining the future of agriculture business

Project Overview

Making the vision of the ‘future of farming-business’ tangible – with the potential to change the whole industry. Creating a hi-fi product demo in order to explain and showcase this bold idea to investors.

The Challenge

Smartwyre is a startup with the ambitious goal to revolutionize the agricultural business. Previously, the chain between suppliers, retailers, and field managers (advising and selling seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer directly to farmers) was very primitive, often relying on calls, Excel sheets, and old-school paper maps. Topp was tasked with creating a demo of a web tool that would digitize and streamline the entire process.

2 colleagues (UX, Visual, Design technologist) and I met up with John & John, two farm veterans behind the idea. We had 2 days of workshops to understand the client’s vision. The outcome was a sketched out a flow that would showcase the hero use cases of the app. We had no more than 4 weeks to create an interactive prototype, complete with a visual style. When designing for a complex field with no prior knowledge, it is of utmost importance to work closely with the client.

I always try to be both humble and curious – I’m hired for my skills as a UX-expert, not for my skills in farming! Often, the only way to keep on progressing forward is to continuously create and continuously ‘ship’ the design to the client. Involving them, but also challenge their preconceptions and sometimes provoke them in order to get quality feedback. In intense projects like this, team roles are often a bit fluid. For me, this meant both working on UX and supporting visual design.

The Result

The demo we created was a success and allowed Smartwyre to go from a napkin idea to creating a company that today has 20+ employees. Topp was contracted for a follow-up project creating a design system based on our initial design and supporting the implementation of the actual software.
https://www.smartwyre.com/