Nutrient Advisor

Overview
Nutrien’s mission is to feed the world. We help growers do their best out on the field, maximizing yields while working efficiently. Our digital platform, Nutrien Ag Solutions, helps our Crop Consultants serve growers. With tools like Seed Advisor, Nutrient Advisor and Crop Planning, they are able to support the grower through every stage of the season and beyond.

Role
UX Designer
User Research, Iteration, Prototyping and Testing
January 2020 - September 2020

Nutrient Advisor

Before we can feed the humans of the world, the crops need to be fed! Anyone who has partaken in gardening before knows the importance of plant food, or nutrients that crops take up through the soil biome. The healthier and richer the biome, the better the plant’s yield will be.

To enable the best possible performance of a crop, the Crop Consultant must know how the soil is doing and what the crop’s needs are. Based on that information, they will create a fertilizer recommendation for the upcoming season.

In order to understand the soil’s health, Crop Consultants will typically take soil samples from a cross section of locations on the field and submit them to a lab. The results look something like this:

Design Process

Our Objective
Provide a way for CCs to make accurate recommendations without a soil sample.

PART 1: Design “Nutrient Analysis” Calculator

Project kickoff
In the winter of 2020, our development team spent many hours attempting to ingest data from our soil and tissue testing labs without avail. So, product thought, why not enable users to recommend fertilizer without test results? They came to me with the idea and I started off on the discovery phase.

Product had the idea to create a calculator that would allow crop consultants to consider the needs of the crop to be planted.

Here is a sketch to help illustrate how it works. Previous crop nutrient uptake + Needs of crop to be planted = Nutrients needed

Design Studio

While I understood the concept of the calculator, I wondered about all the different ways it could be represented and all the different factors that may need to be considered, such as irrigation, manure and yield that might affect the nutrient needs. 

I held a rapid-fire, hour-long design studio for our PMs and Agronomists to have a bit of a brain dump around what the Nutrient Analysis calculator should look like.

Wireframes

At this stage of the product I had highly collaborative conversations with the team, exploring different elements of the equation that could be highlighted.

Around this time is when we brought in the science team, who would be responsible for creating the equations that would suggest how much of each nutrient is needed. They, too, had a unique perspective that helped to shape our line of thinking.

High Fidelity Designs

Once I had taken the team’s feedback into consideration, I created high-fidelity mockups using Nutrien’s design system. This design system, which we called Bonsai, was created by a few of our designers, who were constantly collaborating with the greater team to understand what components were needed across this site. 

At this stage, I was under the impression that growers only needed to apply one round of fertilizer per season, and so it allows the user to only purchase one batch of fertilizer.

User Testing 

Through testing, we discovered that users need a way to plan for multiple applications. In fact, 100% of users in testing mentioned that they would do multiple applications of different kinds.

In asking more questions, we found other points that proved giving the user one batch of fertilizer would cause issues:

• Trucks not big enough to carry a whole season’s worth of fert

• Growers don’t have storage for that volume

• Excess fertilizer wouldn’t be used by the plant– they need to be “spoon fed” small amounts of fertilizer over time

PART 2: Design “Application Plan”

With research results in hand, I went back to the drawing board for an extension on the concept that we originally had. I reviewed the new wireframes with agronomists and they helped me fine tune the solution, and consider other use cases as well, such as fertigation.
 

I also ran the wires by folks in the field to further validate the concept. With all signs pointing to go, I went ahead to design the high fidelity version and do another round of usability testing.

High Fidelity Designs

Since we knew that the first half of the flow (the nutrient analysis calculator) worked well, I decided to pivot slightly in the next concept. In this design, the user start off with a soil test result which allows us to tell users what nutrients are required. This is more accurate than basing the nutrient requirements off of removal tables alone.