Designing an interactive corn product guide
About the project
As a leading global agriculture company committed to crop solutions, Syngenta maintains a growing portfolio of seeds, traits, hybrids, inbreds and varieties. With a large focus on providing the most advanced corn and soybean genetics, Syngenta and affiliated representatives routinely provide printout product guides that are then shared with customers to give product technical data and influence purchasing decisions. The printout guides quickly become out of date as new offerings are added to the portfolio.
Challenge
Take the outdated printed product guides and translate them digitally into a truly useful selling tool for resellers and sales reps to share the guaranteed most current offerings that are relevant to an end customer’s region and growing conditions.
My role
As the lead and only UX designer, I wore many hats as we developed this product over the course of 8 months.
My contributions:
- Worked with account team, legal, and client for requirements analysis
- Identified and prioritized features
- Created user flows and wireframes
- Developed clickable prototype in Axure
- Wrote functional specifications
- Completed QA testing
- Collaborated with the clients, account team, development partners and visual designers
**Due to privacy agreements, I am only permitted to show limited visuals from this project
Approach
Insights
No customization
Difficult to update
An outdated format
Process
Product definition
Using the insights from the customer research and brainstorming sessions as the jumping off point, we determined what features to include in this new digital product guide and how the product should be defined.
Design
I created user flows for the various journeys, several iterations of low-fidelity wireframes, and a high-fidelity prototype of the app, while a graphic designer assisted with the UI. I focused a lot on trying to keep the journeys simple and to not overcomplicate things because this audience is less technologically friendly and has little patience sifting through too many interactive components. I solicited feedback from key reseller contacts throughout the design process to ensure that the users needs were being met.
Technical
In addition to the product design, I also wrote the requirements and technical specs that were shared with Syngenta’s development partner. I had a close working relationship with them during their development sprints and provided design support and QA, ensuring that we stayed on track to meet the deadline and that the product was working correctly.
Features
A gated site with login/registration access
The ability to sort and filter products with a wide variety of technical parameters
Search results that show expandable product details and supporting graphs and charts
The ability to view and resubmit recent searches with one click to cut down on search time and effort
The ability to “Favorite” certain products so that users can build out a customized list of products for their customers
The ability to generate a PDF of the selected favorited products and create a unique cover sheet for customized product guides that can be emailed, saved or printed for individual customers
The ability to update product data and images easily and quickly on the admin side
Final designs
The final product
The final product is an interactive, responsive web app with a front end for users to easily access product data, create customized product guides for their customers, and share digitally. The admin side gives Syngenta more control to easily update product information on an ongoing basis and maintain user access. We delivered a product that helped Syngenta ease their resellers’ pains and provided real value to their end customers.