Define
Working with an existing product meant that I had a large body of previous research to dig into.
The Team: Product Designer (me), Yield Analysis PM, Web PM
The Persona/User: The target users for this product are seed dealers and analytical employees at large farming operations.
The Challenge: Because this is an expansion of an existing, popular product, the goal was to give power users better tools to analyze data, without completely changing the design paradigms that they had learned over the last couple of years. The Climate Corporation had also recently re-structured itds teams, so this project also had two primary PMs as stakeholders, which added additional complexity.
Discovery
A large part of the discovery for this project was talking to dealers and trying to get an understanding of the kinds of conversations they were having with their growers around yield.
From these conversations, we developed some basic ideas of what additional data and analysis tools we should be building in the web product. We then did some basic card sorting exercises to see what types of data/titles would provide the most value.
Design
As part of the design phase, I developed 7 different explorations of ways to display and analyze the data that we decided would provide the most value. These explorations ranged from using all of the iPad design patterns and making it feel exactly like the original product, to completely different ways of visualizing and filtering data.
After several rounds of user testing, we honed in on what was resonating with our users. Since they had been using the iPad app heavily, they had a hard time using designs that did not use the same design patterns as the iPad app. We therefore worked on re-using the same design patterns from the iPad app, but enabled an advanced mode for power users who wanted to make use of some of the additional capabilities.