Hummingbird Technologies
An Artificial Intelligence business that provides advanced crop analytics to its customers by using proprietary Machine Learning algorithms applied to remote sensing captured imagery.
Being one of the first members of the newly established product team at Hummingbird technologies was an exciting thing to be a part of. Myself and the newly hired product manager both started on the same day. We were the start of the product team at Hummingbird.
One of the first task we were part of was planning, coordinating and ideating a refresh of the user interface.
Through user feedback we learned that the current platform had been labelled as old, outdated, boring to look at, confusing to use and had many features included that were either not working or had fallen short of delivery.
The Problem
The interface is confusing to user. The interface is not aesthetically appealing. There are many redundant features still occupying space on the interface.
The Goal
- Improve the usability of the user interface for current and new clients/users based on current and new feedback gathered by the product team.
The Team
Product designer (Me)
Product manager
Head of product
UX designer
Front end developers
Back end developers
R&D team
What we started with.
The app was by no means awful. Some parts definitely did what they said on the tin. Working with map based interfaces provides some very unique challenges.
There tends to be a tiny part of the screen real-estate you can work with and the main challenges revolve around using that space efficiently whilst maintaining a clear task flow for the user.
What problems are we solving & what were our competitors doing?
One of the first ports of call was to take a look at what other people were doing. How did our app compare? Were we doing similar things? Were they doing them better? What was their flow like? Can we improve on their product and slot it into our own?
Below is an example of a few competitors that I gathered and made into a more easily readable format that wasn’t just a spreadsheet.
Everyone loves a spreadsheet!
Iterative design and prototyping.
Change it up a bit. From what you can see above there’s a format that works well with map based interfaces. A side bar, potentially a header (With what we knew was coming to the app later this played a part in futureproofing the design for additional capabilities in the pipeline.
Try and identify a branding colour scheme. What would scream to the user that this was easy and also associating said easiness with the Hummingbird platform?
This first iteration came in the form of;
- Top navigation bar
- Secondary breadcrumb bar
- Left task bar
the combination of these three elements gave us way more real- estate to play with as well starting to give the product a brand, a recognisable look at feel allowing us to make tasks appear more simple.
No longer was the left task bar a jumbled collage of every task available.
It worked to begin with but we had to keep tweaking
Build on what you’ve made
More and more details had to be added.
Where would a user view date information? Where would they create an application plan? Were the call to actions defined enough?
Hidden inside the user interface is a LOT of stuff!
SO SLAP IT UP ON THE WALL!!
There’s about 15 different application plans in this product. Each MUST generate a separate plan, Each MUST have contrasting colours to the base map (but not too similar to another one), Each MUST follow a consistent user flow (Even when that flow contains more or less steps then the other!
Above you can see each application was printed with each of it’s steps. I’ve found that working on user interfaces it can be very easy to not appreciate the bigger picture of what you are creating. It’s a LOT easier to gain a sense of flow and consistency with everyone plastered all over the wall.
There was a lot more to do!
With the company expanding into more and more geographies requirements were flying in left, right and centre.
- How can I see the average NDVI of all my fields at a glance?
- How can I compare one field to another?
- How can I see what my performance was like from one season to the next?
- Where can I download my whole farm KML?
Smashing out the wireframes. Now, I cannot take full credit for everything in this list. There was absolutely a huge effort by the whole product team on this and between iterations we had been working on;
- Benchmarking tool that allowed the user to compare one field to another.
- Moving the navigation bar to the left hand side to allow it to work in a tabular format which would swap from a base-map view to a data heavy view.
- Drawing tools to allow a user to customise their fields rather than relying on their account manager.
- Changing gridded analysis to work as contours.
- Tightened up the user interface.
- A library of new icons bespoke to our app.
- Many a discussion and white board session on what goes where, what problem this solves, what to cut out, what was most important.
- Modal design for singular task orientated tasks.
Plus a whole lot more that can be seen below.
With the culmination of everything above.
The research
The testing
The prototyping
The feedback
The excessive beer consumption from the pub across the road
The application has reached a clearer, more well thought out structure. While things are changing and improving all the time the changes have created a sense of balance, of flow, of clear task orientation and the feedback from users has been phenomenal in terms of usability and ever internally there are less and less comments about things not working. (which is always a plus when stuff just works!)
By no means finished but definitely getting there!
