FutureFarm
Digital-first farming
FutureFarm is a disruptor in the agricultural buying marketplace, with an agile and talented team ready to help UK farmers get a better deal.
Overview
Timescale: 12 Months
Sector: Agriculture, Sales
Target: B2B, Enterprise, SaaS
Demographic: Agricultural professionals (UK)
Goal: Deliver digital app services to UK farmers
Services: Branding, UI Design, Marketing, Website
The challenge.
FutureFarm sought a full visual design service that would offer digital solutions to change the way UK farmers and buying group sales admin manage their agricultural input orders. Working with feedback from farmers and agricultural buying groups, we gained a comprehensive understanding of their priorities, working practices and pain points, which we fed directly into our design decisions.
The main challenges were around challenging perceptions of technology, and the old ways of doing things. We found independent farmers had become comfortable with antiquated and often time-consuming methods of finding deals, which often left them at the mercy of middlemen and with very little transparency around actual costs and savings.
An unanticipated challenge was the scale of the attachment of the farmers that we were trying to help. Using the branding solution, we were able to pivot the strategy to fit the requirements of locally-based and traditionally-minded co-ops and buying groups without sacrificing the efficiencies of the FutureFarm platform.
The solution.
Initially, we worked to develop a brand identity that would appear friendly and familiar, and deliver on the promise of ‘digital-first farming’. A set of illustrated characters accompany the brand and help represent the farming community in a light-hearted and non-threatening way.
Our first workstream was to supply their in-house development team with UI designs for a new desktop admin portal, enabling the buying group sales admins to provide efficient customer care and manage input orders. The second stream was focused on farmer-facing products, working across the entire farmer journey; from buying inputs to selling produce.
The Modern Designer worked with the in-house product and front-end development team to design, build and launch three products; a desktop app, mobile app, and the admin portal. All of which were created using a design system that would ensure a consistent user experience that gave a sense of familiarity.
“Our work with The Modern Designer has been a key component in our drive to ease the life of UK farmers by increasing our digital offerings. We’re leveraging technology to allow our members to spend less time haggling for input deals and have more time for their crops, livestock, and the things they do best.”
Built by farmers, for farmers.
Using real farmer insights meant we could be confident that the changes we made would actively help farmers to manage their orders and make purchasing decisions that could ultimately reduce their reliance on supermarkets and sell produce for a fairer price.
Our sessions with them gave us feedback that made our prototypes more useful, enabled us to get the industry-specific details right, and increased their emotional investment in the app – improving the chances that they would be keen to use it when it launched. We also learned a huge amount from buying group sales admins, who understand farmers from a different angle, bringing another dimension to our designs.
Meaningful impact.
The result is “the FutureFarm app” — a product that helps UK farmers find exactly what they need, and make buying decisions quickly and conveniently.
At the time of publication, the FutureFarm app has completed BETA testing and farmers are successfully making purchases across the UK. The FutureFarm admin app has been trialled by sales teams, helping thousands of unique users to access better deals and put the saving back into the pockets of the farmers.
Additionally, having seen first-hand the benefit of human-centered design, FutureFarm hired us to oversee all aspects of visual product design and adopted agile processes that have accelerated the way they develop products and services.
