Valley Agricultural Software (VAS) is an AgTech company that specializes in providing a set of products for helping dairy farmers keep track of their cattle, their feeding, their performance and even the economics of their dairies.
It is one of the most important companies offering software for dairy farms worldwide and it manages over 5.5 million cows every day in the US alone.
Modernizing a 30-year-old, On-Premise Application
In order to retain the prestige they had gained as pioneers and true leaders in the field, VAS thought that it was a good moment for modernizing their legacy apps. The goal was to move their legacy applications onto a modern infrastructure with an enhanced User Experience (UX), thereby providing better experiences for both current and new users.
They had a suite of dairy management products with more than 30 years of development behind them. There was an urgent need to modernize and converge into one single platform that could easily scale when new products would be added in the future.
Designing the application
During the first two months, we were focused on delivering a proof of concept of how the current app could be translated into a modernized version. For this, we needed to fully understand the industry and make an extensive analysis of the current application.
I had a central role kicking off the discovery process, initial wireframes and mockups for the Cowcard, which was a key feature in the application, since it tracked the cow's health throughout its life. Later, I would be transitioning to the design of the dashboard, that gathered metrics from the other products integration.
We started by learning how the app worked so we wanted to see it in action. We spent a good amount of time conducting UX research in order to identify key points. This entailed:
- Interviews with stakeholders and users in order to identify different situations in which they interact with the app.
- Application mapping together with a journey map to detect the main pain points and improvement opportunities.
- An analysis of the architecture of the information.
- An analysis of Key Performance Indicators in order to understand how to measure the performance of the app. For this, we asked a dairy worker to join us as a consultant.
After gathering all this information, it was time to begin building our strategy. The goal was to translate the legacy app into a new, modernized app. We started by assembling the new user flows. We made rapid prototypes to test different alternatives to the different solutions and once we agreed on the solution, some of the main screens were translated into final mockups.
Tight collaboration with our dev team and tech leads was key to ensure the app's behavior and response was adequate in the context of use we needed.
As the scope of design grew to integrate with other features and applications in the ecosystem, we brought two other designers on board, to work on these and on the mobile application.
The outcome
Dairy managers can now check, in real time, what it is happening in their dairies either on their mobile phone or in the web app. In addition, dairy workers are able to easily use the app in the complex working environment they experience. The new platform provides a web application for dairy managers to invite and manage users, see customized reports, create dashboards and more.
We revamped every app with a fresh new look that is still compatible with what they had before.
Our new version allows managers to see their dairy at-a-glance easily without the need to dive deeply into details.
It allows for customizable reports and multiple data sources.
It integrates multiple products into one. All the data is stored in the cloud (finally!).
