The importance of a coherent user experience in enhancing traceability, efficiency, and scalability
This article was guest written by Allan Corbett, Lead UX Engineer at IGS. Allan’s role focuses on the user experience of our software, simplifying the journey for those using our products.
Our vertical farming technology comes to life through a software platform designed to address the needs of several specific user types. At an operational customer site, you might have operators using it for loading trays, an operations manager for overseeing productivity across a whole farm, and crop scientists using it to tweak variables to optimise growth. The challenge for our software team has always been to design a single system with different interfaces for each of those roles without making it overly complicated.
Over the last five years, how we’ve approached that specific challenge has changed a lot. Customer projects have grown in scale, resulting in a need to redesign workflows and user journeys while maintaining a continuous user feedback loop. We’ve also shaped how the software looks across devices, all with the innate principle that the overall user experience should be seamless – almost invisible – in wider farm operations.
Optimising for users
Vertical farming is a relatively new industry, and with that comes new roles. From our experience, though, these jobs and permissions can often be grouped around the following:
- operators, who move trays, start growth jobs, and handle the daily rhythm of the farm
- scientists, who monitor variables like light, humidity, and CO₂ to understand how plants respond to different recipes
- site managers, who oversee user permissions, auditing, and overall farm performance
Different apps within our software suite support these different roles. Managers, for instance, might use the user management feature to designate permissions. Operators don’t need to see that feature, so in the interests of keeping the experience as simple as possible, they would not have access to it.
Other users might benefit from the app which visualises data like temperature, electrical conductivity (EC), and CO₂ consumption, to help give them a holistic overview of operational performance and expense. Farm operators may glance at these values, but it’s really more useful to those working in managerial operations, or scientists looking to optimise different aspects of plant growth.
When it comes to much larger scale operations, such as a GigaFarm, the overall user experience shifts even more. A farm operative might never actually interact with our main user interface directly – instead, they might follow a screen or handheld device which delivers a list of tasks or actions.
Building on user feedback
Like any good user-focused application, our software is shaped by continuous feedback. We work closely with our Customer Support team, listening to growers and gathering feedback on how they use the apps on a day-to-day basis.
Sometimes, it comes down to anticipating an issue before it even materialises. A recent example of a solution we’ve implemented with this approach would be the QR code scanner. This effectively redesigns the process of adding growth trays into the towers. Previously, users did this manually, physically selecting which tray they were inserting into the Growth Tower. This system worked for smaller-scale operations, but when working with thousands (like you would in a GigaFarm) it became clear that a smarter approach was needed.
We decided to implement QR code scanning, tagging each growth tray with a code, so that the software could identify it and assign it to the correct tower. This makes for a more efficient operation, reducing the risk for human error and allowing for greater traceability.
Designing around user needs
At IGS, our team brings together crop scientists with hardware and software engineers. These disciplines are all fundamental to designing reliable, efficient horticultural technology, but they have different priorities and approaches. For example, percentage measurements for light power are intuitive to engineers, but less so to plant scientists and agronomists. After listening to grower feedback, we adopted scientific units as standard (in this case, photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD)). This bridged the gap between engineering and science, helping the creation of Growth Recipes to become more intuitive for those who used it in a real-life agricultural setting.
Farming from any device
In most manufacturing environments, software is accessed via a fixed screen, often mounted on the machine which it controls. Vertical farming requires something a little different – operators are moving across large sites, scientists may be in labs or offices, while a manager could be off site and looking to keep tabs on general operations. Our software works as a web app, so it’s accessible on any device, with any browser.
In practice, this means that there’s no waiting for updates on the app store, no device lock-in, and no version mismatches. You can use it on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop – as long as you have an internet connection, you can always get access to real-time, up-to-date data. User experience is often focused on mobile first, and we’ve embedded these principles across our software. The apps are designed to make processes simple, regardless of what device you’re using.
Speaking the language of everyday users
These examples all highlight some of our core design principles – it's not just about making something look nice, it’s about speaking the language of the users. Whether it’s a site manager looking for streamlined workflows and efficiencies, an operator looking to plan multiple harvests around one another, or a scientist looking to optimise a particular variety of crop recipe, our software should seamlessly facilitate that.
If you enjoyed this article, browse our other blogs for more information on vertical farming hardware, software, and how it can work for different crop varieties.
