The company’s legacy, low-code software had the opportunity to continue to evolve after years of small iterations, workarounds and incremental feature changes.
Originally designed to support agronomists in helping farmers interpret soil samples and recommend the right nutrients, the platform had further opportunity to be optimised for its users. Users described the experience as buggy and difficult to interpret, particularly when working through complex recommendation data.
One of the clearest pain points was the recommendation tab. Instead of helping agronomists quickly understand what action to take, it presented dense numerical information in a format that felt more like a cluttered spreadsheet than a decision-support tool.
Another major friction point was product selection, as the platform needed to account for millions of slight variations in fertiliser products. This made the existing product silo and drill-down process slow, cumbersome and frustrating.
The client wanted to understand the user experience more deeply and explore what a reimagined, “blue sky” version of the software could look like. The broader goal was to protect the company’s competitive advantage by improving the experience for the agronomists who relied on the tool in real-world farming contexts.
Luminary conducted a UX research and discovery process focused on understanding how agronomists used the platform, where the experience was breaking down, and what a more intuitive future-state design might look like.
The work explored the needs of the platform’s primary users: agronomists who act as science-supported advisers to farmers. These users interpret soil testing data, identify nutrient gaps and recommend appropriate fertiliser products based on the farmer’s specific requirements.
Through the research process, Luminary identified several points of friction across the user journey, including confusing recommendation screens, overwhelming numerical data, and the difficulty of narrowing down the right product from a highly complex catalogue.
The team then developed wireframes and journey mapping outputs to show how the experience could be improved. These focused on:
- cleaning up the presentation of recommendation data;
- making numerical outputs easier to interpret;
- improving product sorting and filtering;
- reducing friction in the product selection process;
- mapping user frustration points across the broader soil testing journey.
The work was instrumental in helping build a roadmap for future iterations of the system, and ensure that customers and their use of the system were at the heart of future enhancements.
Luminary gave the client a clearer view of the platform’s user experience, the operational friction affecting agronomists, and the scale of investment that would be required to meaningfully modernise the software.
The final deliverables included wireframes, improved product filtering concepts and a comprehensive soil testing journey map that highlighted key frustration points across the product lifecycle.
The work provided a practical foundation for future decision-making. It helped the organisation understand that the challenge was not just a surface-level interface problem,
The discovery process also helped de-risk future investment by making the trade-offs clear: meaningful UX improvement was possible, but only if supported by a broader technical and product rethink.
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