Hectare is an online platform that deals with crop trading, finance, and inventory management for UK farmers and grain buyers. As a product designer at Hectare Agritech, my experience has been valuable in working with various teams to ensure the best user experience for our customers.
How I work:
Collaboration and understanding are key in my work. The agriculture industry is complex and volatile with tight profit margins and fluctuating markets. This complexity presents a range of business problems and opportunities.
At Hectare, engineers were organized into two squads, each led by a product manager and designer to oversee the design process. The squads closely collaborated in the early discovery stage to address complex business problems in problem-framing workshops, bringing insights from research to create hypotheses for testing and feasible plans for design.
Subsequently, designers, including myself, would lead the design process, conducting 3 to 4 rounds of design reviews and iterations until a satisfactory solution was reached. The initial phase involved sharing numerous ideas with product managers, followed by evolving the most suitable solution, mapping out user journeys, information architecture, and wireframes to assess their feasibility with the engineering team. Once a design was finalised, I would prototype and present it to stakeholders with an agricultural background to ensure it addressed the pain point. If necessary, direct customer testing would be conducted to gather more in-depth feedback.
Continuous improvement is crucial, and hence, designing with data is integral to my role. Therefore, I and other designers were responsible for monitoring user behaviour daily to identify any bugs or issues affecting usage. We presented project performance data, insights, and improvement opportunities in bi-weekly meetings with product managers and product owners to shape better experience continuously.
Projects I have worked on:
During my time at Hectare, I have been involved in developing numerous features.
I played a key role in bringing Hectare Inventory from scratch to life - simplifying and streamlining the flow of managing inventory, such as adding crops, adjusting inventory, moving in and out, external storage, and recording sales contracts and their fulfilment. It posed a significant UI/UX challenge due to the extensive information involved. Identifying the hierarchy and connecting different flows was imperative to ensure users could easily find, edit, and share relevant information throughout their journey.
Additionally, I was a crucial member in designing and building Hectare Trading, an online trading platform for crops. I led the design in the squad that focused on crop seller sign-up and activation.
In the past, our customer success team used to manually sign up users, and the account opening process involved many initial setups. To make it easier, I broke down the required information into different journeys and stages to ensure a seamless flow. Simplifying the sign-up process was crucial, as it greatly impacts users' first impressions of a product, and a lengthy sign-up process could discourage users. To achieve this, I made sure that only a few important fields were required initially, while additional information was requested only when necessary, such as when posting a listing. We also provided friendly advice and guidance to support new users in their different journeys, allowing them some freedom to explore the platform and have a better experience.
