Leading Agriculture & Energy Company Grower Experience Portal (GEP)

Project

Design and Create A New Grower Experience Portal With Dashboard For World-Wide Commodities Contracts and More

Project Requirements

In order to understand that the agricultural industry, including farmers and co-ops, will use a portal to check their commodities contracts’ status, a new application was needed to track shipments, payments, deliveries, invoices, and commodity pricing for grain, wheat, corn, and others, all in one place. Accepting the challenge, Intertech was tasked with designing and developing this new Grower Experience Portal —a central dashboard for commodities contracts for farmers and co-ops around the world.

Result

Working primarily in Java and Angular, as well as leveraging open source libraries to develop advanced search functionality, Intertech first made sure the requirements were clearly defined between all stakeholders and ultimately met the IT department’s expectations. Next, by putting an agile development framework into place, they implemented a minimum viable product and added features over the course of multiple iterations and frequent releases. Following a process of testing, data migration, and gradual adoption across global offices, the result led to quicker and more cost-effective research and development of new products for the company.

Overview

The user interface and user experience for the company’s Grower Experience Portal was a roadblock for many users. Specifically, most growers wanted to be able to use their mobile devices (phone or tablet) to check their data status. Unfortunately, the original user interface was not responsive, ultimately producing a clunky experience. Besides these issues, customers of the product had varying levels of technical knowledge with software products. For many, the user interface challenges were a support issue because the client couldn’t find the data they needed. For others, the poor experience was assumed to be a potential contribution to customer loss to the competition. In an effort to ensure a seamless cross-browser and cross-device experience, along with staying ahead of the competition, the client engaged Intertech to modernize and centralize the styling and user flow.

To begin, Intertech worked alongside the client’s development team within the existing codebase. Over the course of a typical work week,  Intertech identified areas of technical debt and opportunities for improvement in developer workflow as well as the user experience that would work with existing IT department requirements.

In addition to working with their IT department, Intertech worked closely with the client’s management team. The second agile sprint included a story to rewrite the existing eight separate stylesheets into a single global stylesheet for the application, leveraging the power of SCSS to add variables and imports into the stylesheet workflow.

Next, Intertech addressed the creation of reusable components within the user interface. Converting the existing tabular data into responsive data cards, the dashboard became easy to read and responsive when viewed on a mobile device. It reused the data cards throughout the various screens, completely replacing copy-pasted code.

Finally, Intertech conducted an audit of browsers and screen sizes for the application, giving priority to the most commonly used browsers and devices. In the end, the team systematically resolved any display issues in the new interface providing a user-friendly experience for their customers and resulting in a solution that exceeded expectations and fit the agriculture industry perfectly.