Our Client
A global agricultural and mining company, notable for being one of the largest producers of potash in the world. The organization maintains thousands of retail locations and high-priced agricultural equipment.
The Challenge
The organization needed a way to assess the utilization and financial performance of their assets (primarily large pieces of agricultural equipment), and make informed decisions regarding the approval of new asset purchase requests. The goal was to create a new digital product to optimize asset utilization, ensure data accuracy and centralization, and streamline decision-making for new asset acquisitions.
Dura Digital's Human-Centered Design team was brought on to work with the company’s Digital Delivery team and conduct the initial ideation and discovery phase. To envision this new digital product, the team worked together to ensure a user-focused approach while delivering solutions aligned to real user needs.
The approach
Dura Digital and the Digital Delivery team adopted a comprehensive discovery approach that included the following tactics and artifacts:
1. User & Stakeholder Interviews: Conducting in-depth interviews with stakeholders and end-users provided valuable insights into their perspectives and pain points. The team was able to leverage these insights to start identifying potential solutions.
2. Persona Creation: The team developed detailed user personas to gain a comprehensive understanding of roles, responsibilities, and commonalities between users. This helped ensure user needs were kept at the forefront of the exploration.
3. Journey Mapping Workshops: Through collaborative workshops, the team mapped out the end-to-end processes of how the current users attempt to solve these problems today, and how they might leverage the application that was being built to solve them in the future. This highlighted bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement.
4. Wireframing & Iteration: Dura Digital developed wireframes for the proposed application interface and iterated them through comprehensive reviews with users and stakeholders, ensuring alignment with business objectives and user goals.
5. High Fidelity Mockups: Wireframes were adapted into high fidelity mockups to visualize the proposed solutions in a realistic manner, and to incorporate the company’s design system and branding.
The Solution
The project's success hinged on the fusion of creative solutions with innovative design:
Data Visualizations
The team transformed complex research findings into easily comprehensible visual representations. These visuals vividly demonstrated how the application interface would allow users to make informed decisions on budgeting and asset allocation.
Balancing Depth & Brevity
Dura Digital crafted a combination of simple graphs and detailed tables, allowing users to grasp information swiftly, yet enabling them to delve deeper when necessary, enhancing decision-making efficiency.
Focusing on the Challenges
The team identified that while the end-users had many different roles within the company, they often had similar or identical goals, which allowed the creation of designs focused on providing solutions to common problems, and decreased the overall scope of the deliverables.
The Results
Confidence & Value
The research findings and the compelling visuals presented instilled a high degree of confidence in the efficacy of the proposed solution. Senior leadership recognized that the application would be very effective at resolving the identified challenges and deliver substantial value.
Streamlined Decision Making
By carefully mapping out current and desired processes for capital asset allocation and purchasing, the team was able to create wireframes and mockups for an end-to-end experience that eliminated manual processes and created drastic efficiency increases for end-users and senior leadership.
Digital Roadmap & ROI
The application's modular design approach helped the organization to delineate key milestones, prioritized based on their significance and value. This structured breakdown allowed the creation of a multi-year roadmap, projecting anticipated savings of tens of millions of dollars over a span of five years.
By the Numbers
This case study highlights Dura Digital's Human-Centered Design Studio's successful collaboration with the client’s Digital Delivery team throughout the discovery and ideation phase. Using proven UX processes and innovative solutions, the team gained senior leadership's confidence in the proposed digital solution and laid the groundwork for its development and implementation. This achievement reflects our dedication to user-centric design, the benefits of teamwork, and the impact of effective discovery.
Services Provided
- Persona creation
- Journey map creation
- Wireframes & mockups
- User research
