Agriculture technology providers developing services that resonate with farmers must deliver products that not only provide value to growers but also respect and complement their workflows, Simon Carney, founder of Consortium UX, told AgNavigator.
Carney has been building better user experience (UX) for decades, working with multi-national companies like Microsoft, Capital One, Nokia, and most recently, serving in various capacities in Bayer’s Climate division, building the FieldView app. With his firm Consortium UX, Carney now helps agriculture tech companies build better UX that addresses farmers’ needs.
Throughout his career, Carney encountered many assumptions about farming from his colleagues, chief among them was that companies could build an application for an ideal farm without accounting for specific cases, Carney explained.
As farming goes, seldom does one set of advice or recommended practices work across the board, he noted. These assumptions can lead to digital services that do not address the needs of all farmers, he added.
“The smallest solution we were building for was 2,000 acres, which is drastically larger than the family farm or the hobby farm of 500 acres. And that right there was one of those disconnects that I would keep pointing out,” Carney said, sharing takeaways from his time working on agricultural services.
Should digital farming services have a bit of friction?
Tech giants like Apple made a name for themselves by touting the ease of their products. However, what works from a business-to-consumer perspective does not necessarily translate to business-to-business, especially farming, Carney explained.
“The consistent obscuring of the underlying technology and giving it a brand name and then stripping back features because you don’t trust that your user can learn it is problematic,” Carney said.
Farmers are not simply looking for products that are easy to use, but they are also looking for services to boost their margins, Carney noted.
From a farmer’s perspective, “I’m on a multi-million-dollar piece of equipment. I have a farm, which has a lot of revenue. My take-home may be modest, but the revenue generated is not. I have every reason to invest and use software, which will allow me to get the biggest return on the investment, but it does not need to be easy. I need to see value,” he elaborated.
Increasingly, AI is being touted as a solution to streamline processes and improve workflows, but the technology needs to respect the work of farmers and everyone in the value chain, Carney explained.
“The person you’re trying to incentivize to use your solution has what 30 chances to farm, and they probably found your solution sometime after chance five, six, or seven, and so you have to make sure that your AI solution doesn’t immediately tell people that they’re stupid. You have to support the person just like you do in a real relationship with people,” Carney elaborated.
