Partners page & IBM weather company integration
Background
The ever-growing Agritask Partner Ecosystem is comprised of a global network of leading ag-tech solution providers who we integrate into the Agritask platform. Together we help our customers in the ag-tech ecosystem manage their operations like never before, bringing ag-tech adoption rates to new heights.
Each partner offers its specific specialized technology (e.g., sensors, controllers, machinery, satellite imagery, etc.), while Agritask’s platform unifies all data streams into one place, turning them into interrelated and actionable insights, reports, and recommendations.
One of the Agritask’s partners is IBM weather company that uses advanced analytics and intelligent workflows to reduce the impact of weather-related disruptions on crop yields.
The Problem
Until today IBM weather stations are manually configured (one by one) in Agritask’s web platform, what makes the process very long, tedious and not user-friendly.
Solution & Goals
In order to solve the problem mentioned above, we decided to create a feature that enable users to configure multiple IBM virtual weather stations by using an interactive map via the integrations module and eventually to ease the connection process with IBM partners in the platform.
This is the first step of making the project setup automated and simple, giving transparency to stakeholders for each integration status. In addition, preparation for major infrastructure changes in our code base for scalability.
My role & Collaborations
As the only designer in the product team, I collaborated with the product manager, the director of integrations and one of our developers.
Contributions: visual research, Prototyping, UX/UI design.
User journey
Part 1 - The process of creating a new integration with any Agritask partner starts on the partners page, where the user can see all the partners and choose the relevant one for connecting. The goal was to create kind of a marketplace where both end-users and support users can communicate through digital flows, request integrations and services, and cause an impact on how to deal with the services we provide.
Here are some of the prototype sketches I created for the partners page:
User journey
Part 2 - After the user finds the IBM weather company in the partners page, he presses the “connect” button and then he gets a dialog window with general information about the IBM weather company, the system recommendation about the amount and location of the weather stations, and a map where the user can edit/add/remove weather stations.
In order to figure out the scope of the design flow, I created a rough story line and started to map out the screens flow:
Manual sketches
I usually start the design process with low fidelity sketches. This is a quick way to present many options and ideas that I think of. The flow and screens were already pretty clear after the phases above, so I could jump straight into a quick sketch:
Visual inspiration
For the partners page, I took google play store as my main inspiration. My goal was to create a “marketplace” with all the partners so the users could manage their partnerships in a transparent, convenient and friendly way.
The design solution
My goal was to create a simple and intuitive user experience which will match the Agritask style-guide, and thus adding value by transforming technological partnerships and integrations into simple end-user flows.
Conclusion
As I see it, this project gives the Agritask users great value by replacing the tedious and manual process of creating an integration with the IBM weather stations. Therefore I'm satisfied that I had the chance to take part in this project and provide a better user experience.