The Challenge

Granular’s products were great for large, industrialized farms, but there was a gap in providing mass-market farmers across the globe with an easy way to understand their farm’s performance.

In the meantime, farmers went from having no data to drowning in it with software that was overly complex and lacked any sense of how to leverage it.

Creating a simple tool to help farmers understand their agronomic and financial data would close the gap in our product offerings and be a game-changer in agriculture.

At the end of the day, what every farmer really wanted to know was:

• “What did I do?”
• “How did I do?”
• “How am I doing?”

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User Research

We began with a team brainstorm to help identify what areas we felt confident in and where we wanted to learn more directly from our users. Because some of our team previously came from the industry, we already had some good ideas to work with - but knew we didn't have the whole picture. We started with what we knew and simultaneously built a plan so that the whole team could get a true-to-life sense of our users world and the ways that we could help them.

We developed a plan for getting the team out on the farm and different ways of collecting data about our users and their needs. We built out a research plan, interview questions and an itinerary to make sure we gathered all of the info we needed to start building.

Once we had a solid plan in hand. We got together as a team in Iowa and got on the farm to work with our users first-hand.

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User Journeys and Solution Brainstorming

We circled back as a team with our learnings and working together with our team leads and SMEs, I generated a set of user journeys for us to work from and keep in mind as we built out the initial product functionality.

After various planning and brainstorm sessions with the team and key stakeholders, along with a thorough competitive analysis, I built out a set of wireframes for us to work from that incorporated our learnings and some of the early ideas to validate with customers.

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MVP UI Design and Customer Validation

After finalizing our thoughts with the team, I started putting pixels in place for us to be able to test, iterate and build from.

After bringing our static mocks to life in a static prototype, we had numerous review sessions internally. However, the real test was getting these experiences into our end user's hands for review. With a ton of coordination from our SMEs and internal networks, we put together a testing plan with a variety of farmers, agronomists and seed distributors to gather feedback and make sure we were on the right track before diving into full-on execution.

I ran various usability studies with these different groups, giving each a set of tasks to achieve and rating/conversation opportunities along the way.

Along with these tests, we also formed a beta group for the new product of 500 users across the US to release our first version to.

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The Results

GInsights became the most successful launch in Granular's history with over 13.5K farms, 11K mass-market farmers and over 19M acres in the first two months of release.

In September of 2019, we launched our product to 500 customers to pressure test our system to get initial thoughts from key stakeholders. During this phase, we gathered critical feedback and I led an effort to incorporate a set of UX/UI improvements. 

We firmed up some of the more important analytics for activation and engagement and I built out dashboards that provided key information to track progress.

On January 6th, 2020 Granular Insights was officially launched in the US, Brazil and Canada. It quickly began to gain traction with our key demographic of Corn and Soybean farmers. 

During this process, Granular was also acquired by Corteva - Dow Dupont's agricultural division. This gave our team and product a whole new path to circulate and test the product as well as a brand new set of challenges to overcome.

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