4 minute read
FARMING (WITH) DATA
INTERVIEW | Turn The Page #72 | April 2020 | Artichoke
Data is the new gold. It turns out this saying is now finding its way into horticulture (the agriculture of plants) as well. The company 30MHz is helping growers with ‘data-driven agriculture’: farming with data. Growers of cucumbers, capsicums and other greenhouse yield are using the data visualisation platform to improve their harvest. 30MHz provides them with sensors and a platform to create visualisations of the data the sensors gather.
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interview with Puck Siemerink text by Jorn Rigter and Imara Stemvers | layout by Juwe van Vliet
This is where Puck Siemerink comes into play, 30MHz’s user experience and interface designer. User experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design often go hand in hand, but in bigger companies the two have their own departments. We interviewed Puck about her role at 30MHz and her experience in UX design. “As an industrial designer, you become the user’s voice.”
DESIGNING THE USER EXPERIENCE
The service of 30MHz consists out of physical sensors and a digital platform, that categorises and displays the data of those sensors to the growers. Users can decide which data they need and utilise that to increase their productivity. It’s a bit like Google Analytics for farming, one of the platforms Puck sometimes uses as an inspirational source. “In the future, we’d like to become the digital greenhouse on the grower’s phone,” Puck explains. The challenge is to enable growers to use the platform independently. “Right now, they are still calling regularly with small issues they have.” To improve that, Puck began by understanding the growers.
Her approach is very simple. Based on the feedback she receives, she makes a design for new features to improve the user experience. Since it’s still a relatively small company (a head count of 28), and Puck is the only UX designer in the team, she has to take quick decisions. If the change is small enough, she simply makes the change based on experience and update the software for all users. They don’t do A/B testing yet, in which two interfaces are compared by testing each type individually. “When there is something wrong with the update, we will hear it from our users, but this rarely happens.” If it’s a new feature they are implementing, she will invariably do a user test.
USER TESTING
“I always set clear testing goals and think about which assumptions I made while designing. Based on that, I devise tasks users can perform during the test.” She makes a prototype, that grants her valuable usage insights of possible improvements to the product. The standard for user tests is to stop when no new user insights are coming up. Normally, this happens at about five to eight test participants. However, at 30MHz, Puck has a lot of things to take care of. That’s why she does it slightly differently. “I am basically designing everything from unpacking the sensors and setting them up, to where to place which button within the platform.” That is why she generally does a maximum of three tests, which proved to be sufficient for their aims.
The nice thing about user testing, Puck explains, is that you run into things you didn’t notice yourself. The test is about learning, therefore it’s okay to make mistakes. You try something out by simply making a decision and if that decision turns out to be the wrong one, you do it differently. Making a prototype and realising it should work differently is a valuable lesson, thus Puck starts creating prototypes early on.
WORKING WITH DEVELOPERS
Most people at 30MHz are developers. “It’s really nice to work closely together with developers, since your designs can become reality fairly quickly.” Puck does mention that it’s beneficial to know a bit about coding, so that communication becomes easier. At times, Puck employs a method called Object-oriented UX. In the world of software, object-oriented programming is a form of writing code according to objects. She used the technique to, for example, restructure the navigation of the platform. The nice thing about this method is that it’s easy for the developers to understand; it facilitates the conversation very well.
Puck did learn that clear communication to different stakeholders involved is crucial. When she made sketches for a new interface of the platform and showed them to management, they were very excited. Nevertheless, you cannot display them to developers in the same way. “You should communicate clearly that these are simply sketches, otherwise they might start to think you wish to redesign the entire platform, which will take them months.” Formulating it appropriately makes a big difference in getting the right message across.
A tip from Puck to remember? At the Industrial Design faculty, nobody is surprised or impressed when you make a quick digital model or sketch. When still at the faculty, designers often don’t realize the usefulness and uniqueness of this skill. “A real added value of an industrial designer is the ability to quickly visualise things.”
COMBINING UX AND UI
When asked about the separation between UI and UX design in most companies, Puck comments that she agrees it can be worthwhile to separate them. It’s nice when someone takes care of the visual design (UI) and is aware of all the ins and outs of the company’s style. Although she also mentions that naturally, UI and UX designers should always work closely together. The two are strongly intertwined. What she likes about working at 30MHz is that she gets to do both things, at the same time.
FEATURE | Turn The Page #72 | April 2020 | Artichoke
