Outcome: Creating and enabling co-ownership of our farmer roles using the jobs-to-be-done framework. These farmer roles paired with our new understanding of our different subscriptions, application use (website & mobile app), and farm structures create our Farmer Building Blocks.
The Problem
After completing several research projects, I realised that our personas didn't capture the full picture of the farmer, including their role, farm type, size, FarmIQ subscription pack, and any other factors that affect their decision-making.
From this point on, when conducting our regular research the design team committed to asking all participants the same introduction questions to learn more about their farming role, a day in the life, goals, motivations, frustrations, device use, and our product value to themselves. After every user interview session, we created a farmer on a page, this helped us gather the necessary information to create a refined framework to help us understand our diverse customers more.
We reviewed our current personas
Whilst gathering this information we reviewed the current personas to see why we didn't find them easy to use, and what might be stopping us from using them in our day-to-day roles.
We found the friction around using the personas was that we had two personas for the FarmIQ website, a Data Farmer, and a Traditionalist. These farmers have the same role of a Farmer Owner Operator (manager). Their differentiator was their different levels of adoption of technology. We only had one persona for the mobile app, their role was a worker, and their adoption of technology was not important. At this time with six months of experience researching with our customers, I had never spoken to a worker. However, I had spoken to several small farm Owner Operators and a Stock Manager who used the mobile app.
When reviewing our personas we felt they were oversimplified in some areas, yet in others missed important contexts that would affect the farmers' decision-making more than their technology adaption. For example, the size of the farm and the number of employees were huge factors in how that farmer used our farm management software.
We knew the most important thing we needed was our different users' core Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD).
Applying ArgiTech's research
We understood that farmers different levels of technology adoption are one of the barriers to using a farm management tool and affect how that farmer would use the product. Since the creation of FarmIQ's personas in 2020, AgriTech conducted research titled 'Baseline of Digital Adoption in Primary Industries'. In this research, their team interviewed over 1,000 farmers across the whole of New Zealand documenting the farm type and their attitudes towards technology.
It was insightful to see their six personas on a quadrant graph using low/high pressure and low/high intent. We adapted this framework and included our personas - Data Farmer and Progressive Traditionalist. Going forward, we'll be using this graph as a tool during customer interviews. This will help us determine whether the customer's technology adoption is a voluntary or obligatory decision for them.
Understanding Farmers' Roles
After implementing the new farmer introduction questions, reviewing the farmers on a page, and summarising our findings it became apparent that a defining part of a farmer's mindset is their role.
As the Senior Product Designer and I are not from a farming background we ran a few sessions with our internal farming experts to understand the different roles on a Sheep, Beef, and/or Dairy farm. In these workshops, we co-created our farmer roles from our internal staff's farming knowledge and our experience conducting customer research. We found that even these work-in-progress roles on a page, helped us to think of our customers' JTBD, and we quickly started to use them.
After completing our review, we identified our role priorities. Our top priority remains to ensure that all users who frequently use our applications have a seamless experience. Even though workers do not pay for the tool, if it is difficult to use, they may not utilise it, leading to a potential cancellation of the subscription by the Farm Owner. Our second priority is to cater to the needs of third-party users, particularly compliance roles, such as auditors, environmental consultants, and rural professionals, to ensure that they have the information from FarmIQ at their fingertips to perform their tasks efficiently.
Refining our farmers' roles
We placed all of our 'farmers on a page' from the past year of interviews and grouped them into their roles. We used these to validate and update our work-in-progress roles.
We discovered that our roles on the farm could be classified into three distinct groups. The first group consists of owners who have a financial interest in the farm. The second group comprises non-owners who work on the farm daily. The third group consists of individuals who require access to the farm for third-party purposes. To make it easier to differentiate between these groups, we have assigned each of them a different colour.
The Solution
Our farmer roles are just one part of our modular Farmer Building Blocks. With our roles understood and defined we worked on looking at the other aspects that affect farmers' decisions. To date, our farmer system includes roles, packs, technology adoption, and farm staff structure/size. We are constantly validating these after every research project. In the future, we want to also consider the implications of farm size, stock type, and level of debt.
Our subscription offerings are called Packs. They are categorised by their colour, value statements, and a list of their main offerings. We have added tags to show why farms choose each subscription. For example, "Essentials" is popular with smaller farms that have only one person recording into FIQ. They are concerned about time constraints and mainly focus on recording activities to avoid paper diaries. These farmers are not motivated by farm data and are usually in the "Progressive Traditionalist" space in terms of technology adoption.
Although every farm is unique, there are some common examples of farm staff structures that can be used as a guideline.
Successfully Implementing the Solution
We have a variety of components in our core library that help us understand our customers' needs. We have small role visuals that help us when looking at current user behaviours and roles that have a detailed description of what those roles do, for new the FarmIQ staff. We have roles of a page, that house the JTBD, device usage, pain points, FarmIQ barrier, value, and what's up next. We have a component for each pack, and diagrams of the most common operational structures.
To make our knowledge useful, we use our Farmer Building Blocks regularly. I have used it as an example in my discovery project, and the design team also uses it to understand user flows, customer pain points, enhancement requests, and upcoming research.
Work completed whilst at FarmIQ