
Timeline
May 2020 - June 2020
Areas of focus
UX Design · UI Design
Team: Ryan Pierson, Kara Bates
Description
Barn2Door serves thousands of small and midsize farmers across the country selling a wide variety of food products. The ecommerce platform is designed specifically with farmer's needs in mind, from being able to sell subscriptions and bundle boxes to variable weight items priced per pound and deposits on larger purchases.
The seller side of the platform includes sales and inventory management, fulfillment and label printing, customer communication and management and more, but needed a simple dashboard for farmers to land on in order to be able to glean high level information about their sales and products. Providing these real time insights in a quick and readable format was essential to allow farmers to understand their business on a day to day basis. This product was researched, tested and launched with real farmers, and shipped to thousands of users in a rapid time frame.
OUR FARMER'S NEEDS

Vegetable CSA Farm in Oregon
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Tracking new CSA signups
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Setting limited inventory for future pre-sales to be able to plant and harvest per order
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Tracking top customer information for rewards program
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Checks in on inventory and sales on her mobile device daily and laptop 2-3x a week

Grassfed Beef Ranch in Oklahoma
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Tracking monthly financials
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Tracking top selling items to adjust cut sheet and create bundle boxes
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Comparing order and sales volume as items vary in price from $10 to over $1,000 for whole cow
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Uses mobile phone primarily for calls and checks in on sales via desktop computer 3x a week

U-Pick Orchard in Washington
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Tracking weekly sales
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Tracking presale tickets for U-Pick
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Reseting low inventory items daily for fresh picked berries
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Checks in on inventory and sales daily from mobile device.
Through interviews dozens of our other farms, we found several consistent dashboard needs:
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Quick access to high level sales and order volume
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Feedback on top selling items
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Alerts on low inventory
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Information on new and top customers
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Updates about sales and promotional codes
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Forecasting operational needs
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Easy to use on any device, from the office, on the road or in the field
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Quick to load with slow wifi
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Easy to read and interpret for older and less tech savvy users, yet useful and detailed enough for the most data hungry farmer
Through secondary research and comparisons of top performing dashboards, we found several key elements:
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With a focus on non-urgent sales and inventory data, our dashboard would need be an analytical dashboard rather than an operational dashboard
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Utilizing preattentive features to represent the most important quantitative information, we could make top insights immediately recognizable
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As research shows more than 5 distinct pieces of information on a single page can become distracting, we chose to limit the data to the top requested
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With speed and ease of use so critical, the informational architecture and hierarchy needed to clearly highlight the most important items
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A card based design allowed each item to display similarly on different sized devices, while sorting and scaling to responsively
WIREFRAMES & REFINEMENT

We explored many different directions that utilized a card based system in order to present data in a clear and simple way that optimized on any screen size. Our research indicated sales and order volume was the top priority for at a glance information, followed by inventory updates and customer updates.

In this version we explored how a card based system could maximize the amount of data shown and satisfy all of the farmer requests. In testing however, we found that not all of this was necessary.

Exploring a different visual representations of sales and order volume we found that we could balance the weight of the secondary data such as new customers and top items while increasing the visual weight of the most important data - sales and order volume.

Through refinement and testing, we found that these five elements were the most important to our farmers, and provided them with the quick glance information that they needed. We prioritized Sales & Order volume while differentiating them through different types of graphs, and created consistent sorting tools to allow custom views by day, week and month.
FINAL DASHBOARD

Our final design refined on the most important features, creating visual consistency and weight throughout the UI, and simplifying the control panels so that our farmers could get the information they needed quickly and easily, and sort it as needed.
