The Project

Flora: from agricultural consulting to digital platform

Outracoisa* worked on transforming an agricultural consulting business into a digital platform for high-precision farms. Flora combines technical, operational, commercial, and financial data to help producers holistically manage their properties. The system monitors and measures daily activities to provide farmers with more efficient production management.

The Challenge

Relevance from the outset

Even before we clearly defined the scope of what would be developed, the main challenges were already apparent. First, it was crucial to ensure that the system was seen by farmers as an investment, not an expense, creating real value for the business. Furthermore, it was important to consider that the software's natural habitat would be the rural environment, with all its peculiarities of mobility, user profiles, and connectivity. Another key point was to bring a data-oriented design mindset to the product, where each task performed would be measured and constantly evolved. Lastly, and most importantly, amidst a sea of ​​data, it was essential to find a way to display the most relevant information for each persona, at each stage of their journey.

The Process

All levels of management in one place

Because it's an unfamiliar world to our team, developing the Flora platform presented specific challenges, which required a unique process. During the discovery phase, months of immersion and research were complemented by a trip to the Mato Grosso countryside to observe the producers's daily routines firsthand. Furthermore, throughout the process, constant interaction with the team of agronomists and technical consultants was crucial to immerse us in this new and complex world of agriculture. Throughout the process, we conducted numerous interviews, developed personas, and mapped their journeys in search of opportunities to generate real value. We observed that producers were underutilizing their field experience because they were unable to record, analyze, and use it in decision-making. Therefore, our strategy was to unify all levels of management in a single location and cross-reference data to provide each user with specific and relevant information at each moment of the year.

Visual Identity

Building Flora's brand language

Since the Flora brand didn't yet have its own brand identity, the first part of the visual phase was dedicated to defining the platform's digital identity. Therefore, the first decision we made was to work with a dark background, due to the excessive light present in the areas where the platform, especially mobile, would be used. To define the colors, we drew inspiration from the visual language of the maps themselves, which would be integral to the platform, to create a base palette. From there, we defined three functional colors that would be applied to highlight the main elements. With the colors defined, we then moved on to defining the buttons and iconography that would be used in various applications.

The Solution

A screen for every purpose

The solution featured a robust desktop platform and a monitoring application that together provided all the functionality necessary for digital and holistic agricultural management. In the desktop app, users could perform complex tasks such as comparing NDVI maps, creating points on a monitoring map, viewing balances and reports on the dashboard, tracking insights on crop development, or supervising field activities such as soil preparation, planting, fertilization, input application, harvesting, and more. In the mobile app, where the screen size and lack of connectivity limited the experience, the workflow was designed to be simple and focused on completing previously planned tasks.

Results

Just the first step

All the work leading up to the first version of Flora was just the beginning. With the system implemented, the challenge became testing it on real farms, solving real problems. After finalizing the initial project scope, we began the evolutionary cycles phase, conducted in sprints. Every two weeks, the design team met with the development team and partner agronomists to plan the features that would be worked on in the following two weeks. In these cycles, our main focus was sustainability, which had been left out of the initial scope but gained enormous importance in the platform's value proposition over time. Therefore, we worked on implementing carbon, biodiversity, and water certification protocols and included workflows for new personas that would enrich the producer ecosystem, such as auditors and financial agents.