FarmAct is the operations platform for agricultural contractors across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. One app spans accounting, office management, dispatch and analytics — connecting the office with every driver in the cab, in real time.
ROLE
Product Designer
WHEN
Mar 2020 – Mar 2021 · Augsburg
SCOPE
Mobile + desktop UX/UI · four-pillar product · design system
LIVE PROTOTYPE — FIELDSGUIDED TOUR · YOURS TO DRIVE
LOADING PROTOTYPE
The office half of the system. Fields, crops, machines and planned activities — the dispatcher’s view of what every driver will be doing today.
/01 — the situation
Three roles, three sources of truth, one paper slip.
German agricultural contractors run high-margin, weather-driven operations on paper delivery slips, Excel dispatch boards and scattered DATEV exports. Drivers, dispatchers and accountants worked from different sources of truth.
500+Lohnunternehmen onboarded
50%less office work
+1 hrper driver, per day
30%less documentation effort
One screen for a weather-driven business. Active fields, moisture, temperature and crop health with the week’s trend — because in agriculture the plan changes with the forecast, not with the quarter.
Hours went to duplicate entry and chasing missing tickets — and the person losing those hours was often in a cab, in the rain, with one hand free. Any solution that assumed a desk had already failed.
/02 — the approach
Four pillars, one mobile-first spine.
Buchhaltung for invoices, delivery notes and DATEV, Maschinenring and banking exports. Büromanagement for staff, time tracking and live overview. Disposition for the planning board, digital dispatch, fleet and machine planning, and a live map for follow-me routing. Analysen for profitability, post-calculation and the digital logbook.
The design centre of gravity is the driver: a tablet-in-the-cab experience that works with gloves, sunlight and interruptions, syncing in real time with a desktop dispatcher console built for density.
The paper Lieferschein is the thing being replaced, and it sets the bar — it never fails to load, never needs a signal, and takes seconds to complete. Anything digital has to beat that on the driver’s terms, not the office’s.
FLOW 01 — FIELDS4 FLOWS · GUIDED TOUR · YOURS TO DRIVE
LOADING PROTOTYPE
1.1Guided tour — loading…
The operational spine: every field one card, every card one file. Contractors juggled paper maps and phone calls; I defined the field as the system’s core object — status, crew, metrics and task list in one place, so office and cab read the same truth. Four guided flows — take over at any point; data is illustrative.
Inside this prototype — four guided flows: Fields, the card grid with health, moisture, temperature, crews and planned activities; Filtering, isolating what needs attention; Field file, the tabbed record with growth, soil, irrigation and a task list that updates live; Planning, creating Field E-5 in one form and watching the grid grow; Crops, the season view linking each crop back to its field. Product design for agricultural operations: information architecture, object-oriented UX, status systems, mobile-first enterprise SaaS.
FLOW 02 — WAREHOUSE3 FLOWS · GUIDED TOUR · YOURS TO DRIVE
LOADING PROTOTYPE
1.1Guided tour — loading…
Stock is a workflow, not a list. Fertilizer, seed and harvest live where the work happens: I designed the warehouse as four connected registers with reorder logic and one-click book-outs, so a field task and its material move together. Three guided flows — take over at any point; data is illustrative.
Inside this prototype — three guided flows: Inventory, warehouse stock with reorder levels and a low-stock filter; Fertilizer, booking 24 bags out to Field D-4 with quantities updating live and the booking linked to the field task; Storage, harvest bins with capacity, moisture and temperature. Plus Seed Bank with germination-tested lots. Keywords: inventory management UX, enterprise SaaS design, data tables, stateful interactions, agricultural software.
One field, everything about it. Condition metrics, growth stage with days to harvest, yield estimate and location — tabbed into soil, irrigation and activities so the depth is there without drowning the summary.
DECISION
Design for the cab first
The hardest environment sets the constraints; the office console follows from it, not the other way round.
CHOSE
A mobile-first driver workflow as the product spine
OVER
A desktop-first platform with a companion mobile app
COST
Every office feature has to justify itself against a one-handed, interrupted use case
[FILL] — PROCESS & SCREENSProduct screens, flows and process artefacts for this case. The live site has a screenshot set; higher-resolution versions and one before/after belong here.
/03 — the office console
Density is the feature, not the problem.
The office half runs on comparison: which field needs attention, which machine is free, what stock is left, what has been agreed with whom. These screens are lived in for hours, so the work was to make density legible rather than to remove it.
FLOW 03 — DASHBOARD3 FLOWS · GUIDED TOUR · YOURS TO DRIVE
LOADING PROTOTYPE
1.1Guided tour — loading…
An office console that reads in seconds. Twelve fields, one glance: I scoped the dashboard to four numbers, two trends and the alert stream — and made every alert one click from its field file, because monitoring only matters if it ends in action. Three guided flows — take over at any point; data is illustrative.
Inside this prototype — three guided flows: Overview, the KPI band with soil moisture, temperature and yield forecast; Weather, the seven-day operational forecast with temperature band and rain probability; Alerts, the stream where pest pressure in Field C-3 jumps straight into the affected field’s file. Keywords: dashboard design, data visualization, KPI systems, alerting UX, decision support, farm management software.
Fleet as an operational object. Status, fuel, mileage, driver and next service on every vehicle — a contractor’s margin lives in machine utilisation, so the fleet view carries the same weight as the fields.Inputs, tied to the field that used them. Stock, application rate, last and next scheduled use — the link between warehouse and field that makes post-calculation possible at all.
Every one of these screens exists because a contractor was already tracking the same thing somewhere — a spreadsheet, a wall planner, a folder of delivery notes. The job was not to invent the data model but to put the pieces already being reconciled by hand into one place.
/04 — in the cab
If it assumes a desk, it has already failed.
The driver’s half sets the constraints: one hand free, gloves on, sunlight on the screen, an engine running, and a job to log before the next one starts. Everything mobile had to survive that.
FLOW 04 — MOBILE4 FLOWS · GUIDED TOUR · YOURS TO DRIVE
LOADING PROTOTYPE
1.1Guided tour — loading…
One hand on the wheel, one thumb on the day. The cab is the real office: I designed the phone app around today’s tasks — tick, look up, book out — on the same objects as the console, so nothing waits for a desk. Four guided flows — take over at any point; data is illustrative.
Inside this prototype — four guided flows: Morning, the pocket dashboard where the B-2 low-moisture alert opens the field sheet with moisture in red; In the cab, today’s task list where an irrigation check is ticked with one thumb and the open count drops live; Stock, the mobile inventory with category filters and a 24-bag NPK book-out to Field D-4 updating live; Fleet, machine status where the tanker’s file shows its workshop return. Keywords: mobile-first product design, field service app, one-handed touch UX, bottom navigation, agricultural operations software.
The same system, thumb-first. Dashboard, stock, irrigation zones and fields carried onto the phone at full function — not a cut-down companion, because the person in the cab generates the data.Administration, from the field. Contracts, harvest storage, workers and fleet on the same device — so a delivery does not wait for someone to get back to the office.
FLOW 05 — VEHICLES3 FLOWS · GUIDED TOUR · YOURS TO DRIVE
LOADING PROTOTYPE
1.1Guided tour — loading…
Machines carry the schedule. A contractor’s day lives in tractor hours and service windows; I gave the fleet the same card-to-file pattern as the fields — status, hours, next service, current assignment — so dispatch decisions stop depending on the yard walk. Three guided flows — take over at any point; data is illustrative.
Inside this prototype — three guided flows: Fleet, eight machines as cards with status, fuel, mileage and service dates, filtered to maintenance; Service, the tanker’s file where a workshop slot is scheduled and lands in the log live; Assignment, putting the John Deere 8R on Field B-2 so machine, field and driver plan tell the same story. Administration also opens Customers, Workers and Drivers. Keywords: fleet management UX, field service software, enterprise workflow design, design systems.
The paper Lieferschein is the benchmark, and a hard one: it never fails to load, needs no signal, and takes seconds. Anything digital has to beat that on the driver’s terms — which is why the mobile flows are short, tolerant of interruption, and never block on a network round-trip.
/05 — outcome
Paper out, hours back.
500+ Lohnunternehmen onboarded across the DACH region
50% less office work for contractor owners
One hour per driver per day recovered for billable jobs
30% less documentation effort, zero paper slips
[FILL] What would be done differently, and the honest failure or reversal from this project.
