Achieved 100% team adoption by transforming a farmer's app into an engineer's tool
overview
After biobot.farm acquisition by Bioteksa, the app was handed to our field engineers, and the feedback was immediate: it wasn't working. By redesigning the core experience from a "social feed" to a task-oriented "dashboard," we aimed to slash preparation time for field visits and eliminate the manual workarounds engineers relied on.
ROLE
100%
Team Adoption
Bioteksa's acquisition of Biobot.farm was a strategic move to empower our field engineers with a digital tool for tracking their work. The vision was to streamline data collection, monitor crop health, and improve the service we provide to our farming clients.
But there was a big problem. The app was originally designed for a farmer, who lovingly manages a handful of crops. Its interface was a feed, perfect for scrolling through updates on 1 to 5 crops. Our field engineers, however, are power users who manage portfolios of 40 to 50 crops across multiple farms.
The Business Goal
The directors wanted to incorporate biobot.farm app into the field engineers workflow so they could track their progress and use Business Intelligence to have success metrics and improve their knowledge on the agriculture industry in Mexico.
Our Big Challenge
This app was designed for a farmer's mindset, with deep focus on a few crops. We had to transform it into a tool for an engineer's mindset, which is rapid task management across 50 different clients.
How did I discover the problem?
To kickstart the redesign process, I leveraged a key event: the 2022 Expo Agro in Guanajuato. This expo brought together field engineers from all over Mexico in one place. My goal was to conduct crucial discovery interviews and gather unfiltered feedback on how the recently acquired biobot.farm app was used by the field engineers.
I joined them on visits to demonstration fields at the expo to observe their process firsthand. Watching them interact with the app in real-time was crucial, uncovering the subtle workarounds and environmental frustrations that truly defined their experience. The most critical insights came from these sessions:
Engineers were not using the app in the field
Because a lack of mobile connectivity, engineers were not able to use the app on most of the fields because it relies on a stable connection to work. They will annotate everything in a notepad and move on.
After field visits, activity logs were missing key details
Because they took photos and make notes physically, when it was time to upload them they did not remember the photos that were related to a specific note.
Crop feed was not optimized for engineers
The home app of biobot was a crop feed that features crop cards with the information of the crop. The app was designed to see real time data from your crops at a glance. It worked for farmers that had 5 crops max, but not for field engineers who manage 40 to 50 crops.
Home app of the previous biobot app
• The Crop Card could extend vertically if the crop had more devices.
• The infinite scroll created an overload when the user had more than 10 crops and the app would crash.
• The process to create an activity log was searching the right crop from the infinite scroll, then clicking the crop image and add an activity log.
After identifying the main pain points in the app, I grabbed a notebook and started sketching alongside the engineers right there at the Expo. This simple act transformed our dynamic. They began to open up, not just about their frustrations, but about their own ideas for a better tool. This process turned them from skeptical users into our first design partners, creating a foundation of collaboration and trust that was essential for the app's success.
biobot Redesign early process. Some ideas and sketches made in collaboration with field engineers.
the process
It's Design Process Time
After getting back from the Expo, I shared my insights with the team. With a clear picture of the new user and their needs, we brainstormed ideas and come up with three main features that will improve the field engineer experience and let them use the app on the field:
Home Redesign
By grouping the main elements of the app in sections and reducing the amount of information given in each group, we would decrease the overload and filter the information so users could focus on the task at hand
Offline Mode
This feature was a must have so engineers could use the app on the field and decrease the errors on the activity logs.
Search elements by name and location
By adding a search function in every element list and when selecting a crop to add an activity log, engineers can easily select a crop out of their 50 in their account and log activities faster.
There were some technical constraints that needed to be addressed in order to develop these features:
iOS Developer resigned
With his departure from the team and without a replacement already in line, we needed to come up with a way to develop the app for iOS and Android.
Android & iOS apps were not aligned
Because the DEV team was small, there were features and screens that felt different between platforms.
The solution: using a cross-platform framework
The developer proposed using Flutter, a Framework to make iOS, Android and Web Apps that was similar to Kotlin. We would need to develop the app from scratch but we organized the project so we could use the same screens that were already design with the exception of the home section.
We also leveraged the fact that Flutter has Material Design Components to make biobot.farm Design system that would help us migrate to Flutter faster and give a better experience to the user.
biobot.farm Design System 2.0
Figma File
Home redesign
Changing the app structure
The app already had the structure of Properties - Crops - Devices -Alerts, but it was somehow hidden, because the app started with crops before. Following the mental model structure of the field engineers, we redesigned the home section to have fewer distractions and logic grouping so field engineers could focus on the main task at hand: Adding activity logs.
offline mode
Improving the user's workflow in the field
Offline mode was designed to focus only on field work: The user could only add activity logs and manual measurements so we could store a temporal file that would later be uploaded to the cloud.
Offline mode start page
entering offline mode
Leaving offline mode
Adding an activity log
Files upload list
impact
How the idea performed after launch?
We created a beta testing in iOS and Android so engineers could test it and gather feedback from them. The results were really promising, showing us that engineers were already adding new activity logs in the field, even with lost connectivity.
We also had great support from the field engineers, who took biobot redesign as their project. In the official launch, they served as advocates of the app, showing it to farmers and their co-workers. Thanks to them, we achieved the goal to get a user adoption of 100%
+500
Offline activity logs after the first week of the beta launch
100%
User adoption after 4 months of launch
My take
This project taught me how important it is to involve your users in the design process. I learned that involving and collaborating with them improved the expectations of the project and helped us deliver features that caused a real impact in the work they do in the field. So, if you're a Bioteksa Field Engineer, thank you so much for collaborating with me!