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I worked as a contractor under Heartland Science and Technology Group, a non-profit organization of engineers and scientists who developed the original version of PCM. They consisted of two software engineers, an account lead, and a technical PM. Our team had weekly calls with two client stakeholders of the PCM program. I was responsible for all UX and UI work on this project.
Pain point #1
The data entry workflow didn’t match how farmers think.
The data entry interface was split into discrete activities, but farmers think in “field passes” comprised of multiple activities.
For example, check out this John Deere 1590 Box Drill. It uses vertical disks to slice into soil, which is a common no till conservation practice, while simultaneously planting seeds. Farmers can even add fertilizer attachments so they are applying nutrients at the same time. That’s three different activities all being applied by one machine during a single field pass! This is incredibly important for farmers because fuel, machine maintenance, and labor costs are all minimized by reducing the number of passes taken on a field.
This creates a lot of friction for enrollment specialists. Since farming records are often organized in passes where information is chunked to show multiple activities. This forces specialists to bounce in and out of different sections when adding records to a farmer’s account.
Solution
Restructure data entry to map records to “field passes” instead of discrete activities.
This is a big win for the farmer and the PCM specialist. Specialists have an easier time updating seasonal records for year-end reports, and farmers have an easier time reviewing records with specialists now that the UI presents information in a format that reflects a timeline of events.
In this new design, adding records is simple and specialists can converse with farmers in a natural way.
1. When did something happen on a field?
2. What activities took place on that same day?
3. What are the specific management details of those activities?
This small change had a ripple effect on the entire sitemap, allowing many duplicate or buried pages to be dropped completely in favor of a one-stop shop for entering management records.
Pain point #2
The vast majority of farming records submitted by specialists were redundant to previous years, which was wasting a lot of time redoing the same work over and over again.
Farmers decide what to grow on their fields year-over-year following something called a crop rotation. A crop rotation is basically a repeatable pattern where farmers cycle between different crops. This helps improve soil fertility since different crops take, but also give different nutrients back to the soil. It ensures sustainability and long-term productivity for farms.
There are many variable inputs when it comes to any commercial farming operation, but the crop rotation will often remain unchanged once established.
This should mean that record keeping gets easier over time since farmers rarely break from a set crop rotation. Unfortunately there was no way to easily duplicate identical data between years in the existing app experience.
Solution
We supported two different ways to do this:
1. Define a template of the typical passes and activities for a field per crop in its rotation.
2. Allow copy/pasting the passes and activities from a previous year.
Now that we have a flexible way for specialists to get the annual report 90% of the way to complete in a fraction of the time, things are looking pretty good! That’s when we hit a roadblock.
While this was a setback, I still felt like the quick entry solution was viable. My counterproposal was to move ahead with a new quick-entry system, but to enforce an extra level of integrity checks on key data points. I worked with stakeholders to determine which inputs would be critical to verify in order to get buy in before moving ahead with a design.
Important details like activity dates and amount of fertilizer are still copied in, but flagged for validation. If the data is accurate, specialists can click the check and move on. If it’s not accurate, then changing the value still ensures the proper data was reported and clears the flag. This was acceptable to project stakeholders, and while it does slow down data entry for specialists, I believe it was a successful compromise and response to a valid concern.
Pain point #3
Seasonal reports were generated as static word documents per field and lacked actionable feedback.
After talking to PCM's lead enrollment specialist, I discovered that future practice changes and other recommendations were given verbally and/or recorded in emails between the farmer and their assigned PCM specialist. This was due to the report's rigid format. My goal was to design a new reporting experience that included a summary of recommended management changes as well as the key benefits of making those changes.
The summary view is linked directly to the home dashboard and provides a high level sustainability score for the submitted season. It also contains recommendations for practice changes and possible project enrollment opportunities in order to stack benefits. While farmers care immensely about being good stewards of their land, without proper financial incentive, most cannot afford to make changes if those changes result in less profit. The report summary concludes nicely with a simple cost impact calculator so farmers can adjust variable prices for products relevant to the proposed changes as well as high level commentary from the specialist which provides additional context not easily captured in the updated template.
More in-depth summaries are available per field from the same view I designed for data entry and report submission, which keeps the UX standardized across all product features and reduces development cost.
Pain point #5
Some conservation practices were not properly supported because they required their own unique boundaries that were separate but still associated with a cropping field.
Nutrient management, aka fertilizer application, is a big deal in conservation. Improper regulation of nutrient runoff can result in water quality issues like algal blooms and hypoxia zones that wreck our natural habitats. The goal for projects sponsoring farmers with improved nutrient management is to keep fertilizer out of our natural water supplies.
Solution
I redesigned PCM’s map editing features to allow this new associated boundary type so it would be defined in the context of an enrolled field. Since these conservation practices are effectively a permanent installation on a field, they could completely bypass the data entry workflow with a simply on-map wizard walking specialists through the process of adding this new boundary type.
