“Lead With Pride Live” enables dairy farmers to manage their compliance obligations (environmental, animal welfare, milk quality, and social responsibility) all from one intuitive interface. It has proven to be a real success and is helping farmers climb out from beneath a mountain of paperwork.
Success metrics so far...
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4.5 star rating from a farmer user satisfaction survey
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Over 90% of the target farmer group have adopted the system, meeting the original project goal
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Farm auditors have been able to reduce on-farm visits from a whole day to as little as two hours
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Overwhelmingly positive feedback. eg. “Easy to follow, intuitive, and adaptable to our farm.” – Farm Manager
The problem – and our solution
In order for farmers to receive a premium price for their milk from Synlait, they are obligated to complete and provide evidence of over 400 requirements, every season. The inefficiencies within Synlait's paper-based system for managing the programme were negatively impacting multiple personas:
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Synlait programme-coordinators were spending huge hours & dollars updating and printing extensive handbooks for farmers every season.
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Now a single program-coordinator can intuitively manage programme requirements digitally. Season rollover is automatically taken care of, as are notifications to farmers of any changes.
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Farm managers and workers were often unsure of exactly what their obligations were and whether or not they were on track to meet their end of season audit targets.
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Now farmers can clearly see how they are progressing in real time and can complete requirements with simple checklists, photo uploads, and digital notes.
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Auditors were spending up to an entire day on each farm trying to make sense of often incomplete and disorganised paper and digital records.
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Now we are getting feedback from auditors who have been able to cut down audit time on farm from a whole day to just two hours!
The farmer-facing dashboard. Simple and effective:
An example of a programme requirement. Intuitive and customisable:
The main personas in more detail:
Our process – how we tackled the challenge
As design lead on the project I shared a large part of the responsibility for turning a hugely complex system into something that farmers could realistically manage season after season.
I was fortunate to share this responsibility with a talented agile team.
Additionally, we had the luxury of working directly with a Synlait farmer who provided invaluable insight and a vision of what a good system might look like.
Together, we were able to identify the main personas and their pain points. Having farmers (end users) so close at hand allowed for rapid testing of ideas and quick feedback cycles. This enabled me to work out the most efficient user flows and UI solutions.
Additionally, we had to work through a complex set of business rules in order to provide the farmer with a seamless, simple experience. I was intent on “hiding the complexity” from the farmer, a mantra I kept pushing throughout the project.
After 14 gruelling but invigoration sprints we delivered the first iteration to a beta group. Because of high demand through farmer word-of-mouth the rest were onboarded shortly after.