Crop Scouting 

This work was created for Aegro, where, at that time, I was working as a Lead Product Designer. Aegro is a Brazilian SaaS company that focuses on developing digital solutions for farms.

Although I was the only Designer actively working on this project since its beginning, Júlia Rodrigues entered in the middle of the prototyping phase and collaborated to the process with user flows, icons, and user testing.

Apple Store | Google Play

Challenge & Requirements:
> Aegro just launched a new crop scouting functionality on the mobile app. It aimed to help farmer's employees to perform crop scouting activities with more precision. However, Aegro's clients were experiencing many obstacles, and user satisfaction with this functionality was low.
> This new version needed to increase our user satisfaction (from the manager to the field worker), and, to do that, we needed to identify the main pain points involving this last release and the causes for the low rates.

Role & Responsibilities:
> Lead the discovery phase, perform field research and perform user testing;
> Frame the solution considering user needs and development constraints;
> Create user flows, wireframes, and high-fidelity prototypes.

An explanation of crop scouting and how Aegro has aimed to solve the problem

First things first, what is crop scouting, and why is it important? Crop scouting is about managing the pest infestation in your crop, and, depending on the information gathered in the field, you apply a certain amount of pesticide to your plantation. Crop scouting is a sustainable way of controlling pests as it saves money by avoiding the unnecessary use of pesticides in the field and causes less damage to the environment.

Crop scouting is majorly performed by people. An individual or a group of people should walk in the field and gather information about critical pests that could be affecting the crop. That is precisely where the crop scouting on mobile has to act: helping these people collecting data in the field, even without the internet.

CROP SCOUTING (MOBILE) PROBLEM STATEMENT:

How can we improve the way people gather information in the field for crop scouting purposes?

Researching, prototyping, researching...

How the process looked like

During a trip to Goiás (located in the Center-West region of Brazil), where we visited some farms to showcase the crop scouting initial solution, we could interact with our users in their work environment and ask questions about their daily routine and crop scouting. Besides that, we could perform some usability tests with them.

These are some pictures of me with some of the farm's employees | Pictures were taken by Pedro Dusso, CEO of Aegro

The usability tests used the interface below: Crop Scouting Mobile v1 created and released before I actively started working on the project. My job was to work on improvements to this interface.

Scrollable tabs navigation, each tab represents a different sample type

Thanks to the field research and the opportunity to perform user interviews and user testing, we gathered valuable findings.

These findings were gathered, grouped by affinity, and prioritized. Below, I am showing some of the discoveries related to usability issues. Some insights were directly related to the engineering team, so I am not showing them here.

MAIN FINDINGS

• Our users didn't navigate between tabs, even when we specifically ask them to perform an action that required that. After a few tests, we realized they didn't perceive the tabs or even understand how it works.
  
  
• It is not clear if the users understand that the pests or diseases added belong to a particular tab.
  
  
• The users go to the field, and they have both hands occupied most of the time (one with a wood stick or book, and the other with the phone). Because of that, they need to be able to input data with only one hand.
  
  
• Some of the people who perform croup scouting are interns. These interns are from agronomy schools, and they are not familiar with the appearance of pests and diseases. In some cases, they have to bring books to the middle of the field or download specific apps to identify what was found.

In short, the scrollable tabs were confusing to our users, and the interface needed a redesign. Besides that, we needed to have in mind some constraints regarding the activity: the fact that our users only had one hand available.

Regarding the difficulties in identifying pests and diseases, besides adding more images to the list and a description, we thought about creating an image recognition AI (something that some competitors already have). As the AI idea had some significant technical challenges, we deprioritized it.

I started redesigning the crop scouting screens. After a few design iterations, I ended up with an interface that I thought would solve most of the problems. Besides the significant fixes on the navigation, it was added colors to show the pest or disease's severity level: from green (situation under control) to red (severe infestation). With these color schemes, it was possible to see what the data collected meant in real-time.

Focus on vertical scrolling and expandable cards

In Goiás, we only visited big farms, and most of them planted cotton that needs a very systematic way of crop scouting, our user sample was too narrow considering the user base who would use the feature. Thus besides the big cotton farmers, I decided to reach out to other clients with smaller properties, different crop types, and different regions to test the new interface presented above.

NEW FINDINGS

• In the different scenarios presented to our interviewees, the majority completed the tasks without any problems.
  
  
• Many interviewees questioned why we had so many sample types as they were only going to use one.
  
  
• Some interviewees didn't understand the name of some sample types.
  
  
• Some asked if they could create specific sample types and get rid of the ones they won't use.

The tests' results were optimistic. The interviewees could easily interact with the interface, identify the new UI elements' meaning quickly, and interact with the expandable cards. However, we concluded that crop scouting is done differently from farm to farm, type of crop, and country's region. Some do it in a very complicated way and others in a much simpler way; it all depends on the size of their property, number of employees, crop type, location, humidity, and so it goes. 

We needed to create something flexible and make it even simpler.

Final Interface of Mobile Crop Scouting v2

We decided to make the interface simpler: we took out all the sample types on the screen, and, for the first use, there is just one generic sample type. If someone needs to add more complexity levels, this person can adjust and create different sample types on the button located on the top right corner.

When you save your findings and go to the next point, it shows what you added for the first time, and you don't need to add again whatever you have added before. The manager can also plan the crop scouting activity on the desktop app: the manager can set what key pests should be evaluated and the sample types for a specific area.

Screen recording of Aegro App | Updated interface on the crop scouting input screens

Screen recording of Aegro App | Updated interface for the summary of crop scouting

Results & Outcomes

It is hard to measure the impact of a redesign, principally when other improvements were also made: the app's performance, offline use, etc. Our user base that uses crop scouting got bigger (the sales team made a lot of upsells because of this feature), and the average time using the app for clients who have this feature is more prominent than the clients who don't.

Next Steps

• The idea of using the mobile app for field activities and the desktop app for managing purposes and consuming data is outdated, even in the farm setting. More and more, our clients want to make decisions based on data using the mobile app and spend less time on the computer.
  
  
• After this release, we got to know that many of our clients were sharing the results of the crop scouting activities made by the mobile app by Whatsapp and making the decisions solely on that data. Thus, the team had to improve how you visualize the crop scouting results on the app and how people can share them so the results won't be misinterpreted.
  

Last update in March, 2023.