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.
Year
2019
Client
Smartwyre
Role
UX/UI
The Challenge
Smartwyre is a startup with the ambitious goal to revolutionize agricultural business. Previously the chain between suppliers, retailers, and field managers (advising and selling the seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer directly to the farmers) was very primitive; Often relying on calls, excel sheets, and old-school paper maps. Topp got the task to create a demo of a web tool that would digitalize and facilitate the whole process.
The Project
I and 2 colleagues, (UX, Visual, Design technologist) met up with John & John, two farm veterans behind the idea. We had 2 days of workshops – trying to understand the vision of the client. The outcome was a sketched out a flow that would showcase the hero use cases of the app. We got no more than 4 weeks to create an interactive prototype complete with visual style. When faced with designing for a complex field where you have no prior knowledge it is of utter importance to be 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, the roles in the team are often a bit fluent. For me this meant both working with the UX as well as 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 support the implementation of the actual software.
https://www.smartwyre.com/