Nitrogen Monitoring
My Responsibilities: Product design, mobile & web | User interviews | Usability testing
Two crucial questions farmers want to know through the growing season: When should I apply Nitrogen, and how much? Enter: Nitrogen Monitoring, the ability to visualize soil information and accumulated precipitation to predict how much Nitrogen will be left on a field at VT/R1, a critical corn growth stage.
Summary of Work + Findings
Monitoring Nitrogen requires agronomists to reference multiple variables (soil, weather, uptake, mineralization, leaching, and more!) to better understand why a field is over-performing or under-performing in terms of Nitrogen health.
Through in-depth interviews, we observed that our existing product required users (agronomists) to constantly switch back and forth between UIs to reference this information, making it time consuming to take action.
Users also struggled to understand which of their fields needed their immediate attention for Nitrogen applications. Knowing whether or not a field is deficient in Nitrogen can translate into a potentially massive savings in terms of yield.
After completing user interviews, I worked on a number of concepts to ease cognitive friction and add value to our users’ understanding of Nitrogen on their fields. Once we completed usability testing, we zeroed in on two important improvements:
A user experience that allows people to reference all necessary valuable information they need in a single, helpful UI.
A new ranking system, Nitrogen Monitoring Priority, that provides users with quick, actionable feedback regarding which fields need their attention.
My Team: Product Manager | Engineering Manager | Engineering Team | QA