Ancera’s Post-Harvest App
The Challenge
Ancera’s Post-Harvest App was created for the food production industry to be able to make data driven food safety decisions by monitoring and analyzing public performance data that the USDA and FDA publish.
During the initial phase of this project, I worked closely with the CEO of Ancera, grappling with the unique challenges of introducing user-centered design practices in an organization where UX design and product management practices were not yet adopted.
Ancera was a particularly challenging company to work with. Although I was hired as the in-house UX Designer, it became increasingly clear that they were looking for a UI designer. Navigating a company with low UX maturity created additional tasks of advocating for UX processes, introducing a design system, and managing the design for multiple web and mobile products as the only in-house UX designer. This put an exorbitant amount on my plate for my first UX job.
In this work environment, I often found that my suggestions or comments were dismissed, while a white male coworker would share the exact same idea with slightly different wording and be applauded. As a woman of color in the workforce, I was not new to this kind of behavior, but it was still frustrating and challenging to navigate on top of my other responsibilities.
Despite these challenges, I pushed for design thinking processes and the questioning of whether the ideas being discussed served actual users' needs or were merely 'cool ideas'.
The initial product vision of this application was to provide the insights to facilitate decision-making by professionals in the agriculture industry, rather than tell them what decisions to make.
This project primarily focused on quick creation of basic, low-fidelity wireframes with limited opportunity to implement UX procedures to share with stakeholders and receive input.
After the first round of wireframes, as I suspected, the features decided by the CEO weren’t directly addressing user needs. As the only UX designer in a company with low UX maturity, I faced significant challenges in advocating for design thinking processes and incorporating user feedback. Despite these challenges, I remained committed to creating a product that addressed the specific needs and requirements of our target audience. However, my gentle pushback and questioning was met with resistance from the CEO, who labeled me as "difficult to work with" regardless of my respectful approach. As a woman challenging leadership in a corporate environment, this wasn’t surprising, so I persisted in my efforts to improve the product, prioritizing our users’ needs above office politics.
Fortunately, when one of our experienced R&D engineers transitioned into the role of Product Manager and took full ownership of the product, I was able to successfully introduce more design thinking process. With his deeper knowledge of our customer base and industry, and my knowledge of human-centered design, we were able to work on a solution that actually addressed the specific needs and requirements of our target audience starting with elaborating on a more specific product vision statement.
A Slight Pivot
The ultimate aim of this application is to provide food manufacturers and their allied businesses with practical insights regarding microbial performance within the framework of targeted microbial intervention strategies.
Taking Action
As a UX designer, I am committed to promoting a user-centered approach in all my projects. When working with the Product Manager to brainstorm feature strategies, I took the opportunity to introduce him to the value of various UX research methods, starting with whiteboard exercises leading to Information Architecture.
I was thrilled to see that the PM not only took my advice but found it helpful, which led to a shift in the team's mindset towards a more user-centric approach.
As a result of my advocacy for design thinking processes, I even inspired the PM to create personas which in turn helped us both to fine tune our product by directly addressing the needs and expectations of our user.
After another iteration of low fidelity wireframes, the diligent push for understanding of why certain features were needed and what problems they would solve had led to an interface that our users and stakeholders found much easier to navigate.
While juggling the initiation of a design system, design for three other products, and strategizing the design for this product, another designer was brought on board to help lead the visual design of the Post Harvest app, allowing me to focus on the design strategy as I worked with the PM to condense the complex biotech jargon into a simple user experience.
As the PM and I were attempting to get the designer get up to speed with all that Ancera is trying to do via whiteboarding exercises including user stories, the visual designer and I discussed that trying to get him to understand all the information that took me a full year and others four years of working at Ancera to grasp would end up taking up more time than it would be worth.
So we agreed to a flow in which I translated the dense and complex information into design strategy using my knowledge of interaction design best practices, which allowed the designer to focus on the visual design direction.
Though I advocated for conducting usability testing with the wireframes, it was decided that there would be a meeting where the product manager showed our stakeholders the current wireframes and explained it to them before getting their feedback.
The feedback we put into actionable steps were:
Products (i.e. avibrom) aren’t the priority; allied customers want to see relevant information in the industry today. Has USDA had a recall? Has a customer had a recall?
To solve this we moved the products to its own page accessible via the bottom navigation bar, and moved industry highlights and notifications to the top of the dashboard screen.
Allied customers want to be able to see how the customers are doing. What were the latest reports of a facility’s culture? How are they stacking up with microbial standards compared to other facilities? What can help us decide whether to gain, grow, or keep customers?
We added an opportunity index and other microbial ranking tool for facilities such as facility specific data accessible within their respective pages.
Allied customers want to see different serotypes within microbial data.
Now, when users search for prospective facilities using the discovery tool, they can conduct an advanced search by selecting the serotypes they want to specify within microbial performance as well as see that information in facility data.
Results
After a successful demo of the improved wireframes, we officially launched the app successfully in December 2022 with the following features as the MVP:
Quick onboarding screens when the user first signs up and logs in.
A dashboard with highlights for industry news, notifications, as well as a partial list of customer facilities and watchlist facilities, a filter menu so users can select a protein and processing category to customize the information they want to see on our app, the ability to access user settings, and a navigation menu that allows the user to quickly change between dashboard, facilities, notifications, products and the facility finder tool.
Users can search for facilities in the discovery tab by typing in the search bar or by setting specifications in the customization menu to find specialized results and see how well the facilities with those specifications rank against each other.
My facilities page with saved customers as well as a watchlist of facilities they want to track.
Facility profile pages containing the information about that facility as well as performance metrics and an interactive timeline that allows the user to assess the facility’s performance compared to peer groups, industry percentiles, and events over time.
Products that display a complete list of product offerings sold by the user’s company.
Notifications about app release info, new datasets received, facility changes in salmonella category, and facility survey culture results.
With this MVP launch, we conducted additional usability demos and created a user guide, resulting in a successful onboarding of new users as well as 100% retention.
Reflections
My transition to Ancera was a challenging one. As a UX designer with a background in beauty and retail, I found myself in the complex world of biotechnology, grappling with dense information and complex language. Moreover, I soon discovered that my role was meant to be more UI-focused rather than leading UX processes.
Despite these challenges, I was determined to make the most of my time at Ancera. Once I handled the products that required my immediate attention, I then began by trying to raise awareness of the value of UX through a presentation, but unfortunately, my position was one of many that were cut before I had the chance to do so.
Nevertheless, I learned a great deal from my time at Ancera, particularly about the importance of asking specific questions to fully understand the expectations of a role. I also realized the need to proactively seek opportunities to educate and elevate a company's UX maturity.
One painful lesson I learned was the need to create more organization from the start and document all the information I was learning somewhere accessible outside of my work computer. When I was caught in the great tech layoff wave of 2023, I lost access to many of my notes and documentation. However, I was fortunate to have taken some notes on Notion and sent myself some wireframes after the product launch.
This experience taught me the importance of meticulous documentation and maintaining better track of metrics to ensure that the products I design meet and exceed user expectations while fulfilling business objectives. In the future, I will use my Notion account to record each step of the design process and advocate for myself to secure the necessary data to achieve success.