Industries
The person using it is standing in a field
Agriculture runs on relationships and phone calls, so every digital product sold into it is up against somebody the buyer already trusts. Getting it used is not really a training problem, it is a persuasion one, and it gets decided somewhere with one bar of signal.
Reaching the people who actually grow and trade.
What gets in the way
Bought at a desk, judged in an orchard.
Agri software gets specified by people at desks and used by people who want to be finished before dark, and those two groups want very different things. Anything that costs somebody time in the field so that head office can have better data will lose that argument, however good the reporting looks.
You are competing with a spreadsheet
It works without signal, it bends to whatever this season is doing, and everybody already knows how to use it. A product that only wins in a demo ends up running alongside the spreadsheet rather than replacing it, and the take-up number you report is then counting logins rather than actual use.
Trust travels through people
Buying decisions here move along relationships, whether that is a co-op, an agronomist, or a neighbour who tried it first. A campaign that ignores all of that is talking past the decision, because the decision happened in a conversation you were not part of.
There is one window a year
There is one stretch each year when anybody in this industry has the attention to try something new, and it rarely lines up with your financial year. Launch outside it and the product does not get rejected, it just does not get looked at until the following season.
How the pieces fit
Give the chain something to pass on.
The decision takes the long way round here, through an agronomist, then a co-op, then a neighbour who tried it first, and by the time it arrives three people have vouched for it. None of that is a reason to stop marketing, it is a description of where the marketing has to land. What you control is the material each of those people is holding when they pass it on, which is why this is rarely a features problem.
What they pass on
Trial results, a spec, a number somebody can repeat in a shed without needing your website open. This is the part you actually control.
The route it takes
Through people who are trusted already, each with their own reasons for passing it on, and each arriving with something you gave them.
- Agronomist
- Co-op
- Neighbour
By the time it lands, three people have vouched for it
Which is why getting a product used here is rarely a features problem. Your job is to make the chain easy to repeat.
How we help here
What we actually do for you.
The design work that decides whether somebody in a field opens your product a second time, and the pages a buyer or a grower sees before they ever log in. Alongside that, the automation that stops a relationship-led sales process living entirely in one person's head.
The work
One grower, one marketplace, the same problem.
At the growing end, the orchard management system for one of South Africa's largest agricultural exporters, taking spray and fertilisation plans off spreadsheets and out to the people running the blocks. At the trading end, we worked inside the team on an agri-trade marketplace, cutting out clicks and clearing up crowded screens so that a farmer could use it standing in a field. Both jobs were really about getting people to use the thing.
Nile.ag
Cohesion for a fast-growing agri marketplace
An embedded UX partner bringing cohesion back to a multi-marketplace agri-trade platform: fewer clicks, decluttered dashboards, and a mobile experience farmers can actually use in the field.
Karsten Group
Orchard planning, off the spreadsheet
Designing the orchard management system for one of South Africa's largest agricultural exporters - agronomist-led spray and fertilisation programmes planned centrally, pushed out to orchard managers, and adapted as the season turns.
Talk to us
Built it for agriculture, and nobody is using it?
Take-up in this sector is almost never about features, and working out what it is actually about is usually a short piece of work with a big answer at the end of it.