MY ROLE

My role was the primary UX/UI designer for this project. I worked closely with the product owner and the development team. I assisted the product owner in conceptualizing and designing the POMETA weather and the vision app. I created deliverables representing the product experience through user journeys, personas, wireframes/flows, presentation visuals, and low- to high-fidelity prototypes. I also organized team workshops to drive agendas between the cross-functional teams to prioritize tasks, find opportunities, risk assessment, and assist in project planning. I also had to undertake the Quality Assurance role while products were in development. I shaped and updated the current design system and made new icons and components while maintaining internal consistency across the ADDIUM platforms. 

THE RESEARCH

I worked closely with a product owner with a background in the agricultural fruit industry; this research aims to validate the product owner's ideas of the users' needs. Some of the project's constraints were that we were a small team, launching a product in a very short timeline, and the requirements were constantly changing. Note that with the changing needs, it was also essential to go back to researching and user interviews.

Diving into what the growers do in a high-density orchard, I needed to know the tools and jobs they use to manage their crops and when? What is their most significant pain point, and how are they mitigating their issues? I compared other platforms, services, and apps that the growers use for their orchards to understand what data points are significant and how POMETA and ADDIUM, with their advanced weather station and computer vision,  could get consumer buy-in. Below are some processes I learned to understand the users' motivations and who they could be.

THE PROBLEM

After narrowing down ideas from the product owner and user interviews, here are the two issues that the growers are facing:

1. Growers are not accurately managing their crop load, which makes their projection yields inaccurate or unpredictable.

2. Growers are using multiple sources to get weather data that may not be specific enough to their location to mitigate frost damage.

PERSONAS:

As the project progressed, there were some refinements to our target audience, and it became a more focused one, the Orchard Manager, Orchard Consultant, and Farm Hand.

THE SOLUTION

The solution is to incorporate our product into the users' workflow to give them localized accurate weather modeling to make informed weather-related decisions, such as mitigating freezing of the crops, when to spray, and when hot weather will be an issue. Another key is using computer vision to count and size fruit and see the overall well-being of their orchard. There is a  need to show complex data from the weather station and data collected from computer vision, aiding the orchard manager and consultant in making these informed decisions.  

PROJECT PLANNING

In the project planning workshop, in collaboration with the development team and the product owner, the solution needed three phases due to the project constraints of a tight timeline and development resources. 

The goal is simplicity, consistency, intuitive, intelligent, and has a great user experience across the three phases.

PHASE 1: MOBILE WEATHER APP

PHASE 2: VISION APP

PHASE 3: CROP LOAD DATA

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