Project Livestock (in short PL) breaks the traditional way of working by enabling high tech in livestock farming. The farmer using PL is working the same way he’s used to but instead he uses connected devices like a mobile app, a RFID hand scanner and bluetooth scale to measure every single product to follow its lifecycle by collecting data.
Livestock farming has the same way of working for over decades. Farmers are still using nationwide measurement data but forget to check how their product is doing compared to the rest of the country. Without monitoring their products (collecting data) they don’t know how much money they are losing and don’t innovate to improve there business.
The biggest challenge of this project was to understand the way farmers work, think and use mobile devices. Specially the last one was the hardest part as they weren’t using any mobile devices before and had a bit experience in using a (windows) computer. To understand there way of working and thinking we visited a farm and helped for a day.
The farmer uses the Android mobile app to collect and adjust data. Because this is a big pile of data and needs to be understandable the app provides little detail. The total data report can be found in the online portal which stores all data and is in sync with the mobile app. The farmer logs in with his credentials and sees a dashboard with the most important actions he still needs to do or have done. He can also follow a product's lifecycle to see when the growing started / stopped and is ready for shipment. Also medical treatments are being applied during the lifecycle and can be seen in the framers portal.
The Livestock Project is still in prototype phase but the first test results are magnificent. The pilot is being tested by three different types of livestock companies and employees for a longer period. The mobile app fits in the working pattern they’re used to, is barely asking more handling and the learning curve to use the app is really low. The portal is very useful to see how the company is doing and gives great insights.
These are a few of the best compliments I can get as a User Experience Designer. The Livestock project was a great opportunity to target a new kind of user and help innovating a traditional market.