Industries
Your user is standing in a field
Agriculture is a relationship business that runs on phone calls, and every digital product sold into it is competing with a person the buyer already trusts. Adoption here is not a training problem, it is a persuasion problem, and it gets decided somewhere with one bar of signal.
Reaching the people who actually grow and trade.
What agriculture demands
Bought in an office, judged in an orchard.
Agri software gets specified by people at desks and used by people who want to be finished before dark, and the two rooms want completely different things. Anything that costs somebody time in order to give head office data will lose that argument no matter how good the reporting looks.
The spreadsheet is the competition
It works offline, it bends to whatever this season is doing, and everybody already knows it. A product that only wins in a demo ends up running alongside the sheet rather than replacing it, and the adoption number you report is measuring logins rather than use.
Trust travels through people
Buying decisions in this sector move along relationships - a co-op, an agronomist, a neighbour who tried it first. A campaign that ignores that is talking past the actual decision, which was made in a conversation you were not in.
The season is the calendar
There is one window each year when anybody in this industry has the attention to try something new, and it is not the one your financial year suggests. Launch outside it and the product is not rejected, it is simply not looked at until next year.
How the pieces fit
Central plan, distributed reality.
An agronomist sets the programme once and it goes out to every block. What comes back is what was actually done, captured on a phone that may have had no signal at the time and synced when it found some. That return leg is where adoption is won or lost, because it is the only part of the picture that costs the user something.
The plan
One agronomist sets a programme for the season.
Every block
It fans out to ground that is never uniform.
- Block A
- Block B
- Block C
- Block D
Captured in the field
What actually happened is recorded where the work is - which is usually where there is no signal.
Queued, then synced
The record waits on the device and moves when signal returns, and the plan moves with it.
How we help here
What an agri team gets from us.
The experience work that decides whether somebody in a field opens your product twice, the surfaces a buyer or a grower meets before they ever log in, and the automation that keeps a relationship-led sales process from living entirely in one person's head.
The work
One grower, one marketplace, one problem.
At the growing end, the orchard management system for one of South Africa's largest agricultural exporters, taking agronomist-led programmes off spreadsheets and out to the people running the blocks. At the trading end, an embedded design partnership on a multi-marketplace agri-trade platform: fewer clicks, decluttered dashboards, and a mobile experience farmers can actually use standing in a field. Both engagements were adoption problems.
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 for agriculture, and nobody is using it?
Adoption 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 large answer.