Problem
Design and build an operating system for vertical farms - a greenfield industry with hundreds of unknown unknowns. A technical prototype needed to become a production-ready system serving plant scientists, engineers, and farm staff across multiple countries and languages, all managing complex growing environments in real-time.
Goals
- "Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible" – Alan Kay
- Give people the best tools for growing crops, anywhere in the world
- Surface useful information that helps people make decisions
- Show people what they need to see, not everything we could show them
- Work on any device - phone checks from home, tablets in the Towers, desktop deep-dives at work
Approach
- Make the defaults sensible
- Seek clarification from experts and novices
- Iterate based on feedback
- Reduce complexity where possible, but still allow minute adjustments
- Design for occasional use as well as 9-5ers
Team
- Sole designer working directly with 3 product owners
- Collaborated with developers in product, data and research departments
- Regular input from customer support - they hear the pain points first
- Stakeholder alignment across engineering, sales, and operations
Role & Responsibility
- Lead designer for all UI and UX decisions
- Created and maintained Eco, the design system - from scratch, in code
- Authored nearly half of the code for the frontend
- Supported other teams across the business with design guidance
Charting & Data Visualisation
- Used Plotly for basic in-app visualisations where needed
- Deliberately avoided building complex charting - our users were scientists with their own analysis tools and workflows
- Focused on data access: exports in multiple formats (CSV, etc.) so users could work in Excel, R, Python - whatever they preferred
- The UX goal was to get out of their way