Studies show that as much as 35% of the world’s bees are dying each year and if honey bees become extinct, the global food chain will collapse. Beewise aspires to save the honey bees by developing the world’s first – and only – robotic beehive that will help avert the honey bee’s fate.
The device automatically controls for climate and humidity conditions, detects and eliminates pests and parasites, identifies when a colony is preparing to swarm, and sends alerts when human intervention is needed.
In order to deliver Beewise technology to the maximum number of customers as soon as possible, Beewise provides pollination -as-a-service to commercial almond growers (in addition to numerous other crops) and working with beekeepers via a bee leasing model. Beewise also provides traditional bee brokerage services.
My Role
When I joined the company, Beewise had a web application that served the growers and the beekeepers that work with us but there was no solution for the bee brokers, which is one of the three main personas the company addresses. One of my roles was to design a web application for the bee brokers, together with the product manager.
A bee broker is responsible for brokering various deals with farmers and others in the agriculture industry (aka growers), who desire to have their crops pollinated.
The brokers act as an intermediary between the growers and the beekeepers and are responsible for coordinating the transport of honeybees across the country for the pollination services.
Research Method
To understand the broker's needs better, me and the product manager flew to California to meet with brokers that work with us. The goal was to understand how we can develop a web application that will make their work easier and more efficient and most importantly an app that they will want to use, that they will benefit from.
Some pictures from our work trip to California:
We quickly understood that though some of the brokers are young and tech savvy and some of them are exactly the opposite and even a bit afraid of progress and getting involved in the tech world. There are young brokers in this industry that are in their 20’s but also older ones in their 50’s that have been doing this for their whole life in the same way.
We asked the brokers to show us how they work today. The young ones combined their work process between google maps and excel sheets and the older ones worked with printed maps and lists with pen and paper. We quickly understood there is a gap between how the different generations but same persona work for the same purpose.
Also, we understood there were two different main approaches for how the broker decided which beekeeper will be assigned to which ranch.
One approach is to plan which beekeeper will be placing his hives in which ranch in the planning stage, and the other is deciding “on the go” while installing the hives, which beekeeper will be placing his hives where, going north to south or the opposite.
The product manager and I asked ourselves how we can combine the two main work flows and two main approaches, into one app that will be much more efficient for both of them but not too overwhelming for the non tech brokers that are not used to the digital world.
Wireframes
Like every good design process starts, the product manager and I started to sketch on a white board everything that came to our minds in the broker’s work process, starting from summarising what we learned about their work process and schedule:
And continuing to our first thoughts about how we can help to optimise their work process with the web application we will create for them.
These are very rough sketches and the very first wireframes we created, still in the US:
When we returned back home we kept working, refining and improving our initial thoughts, asking the brokers more questions via zoom conversations and emails and progressing to a more ripe idea.
In that stage we understood that the application will have two main flows, one to set up a new ranch and the other to view and edit all the ranches the broker has.
This was the first wireframe for the view of all the ranches the broker has:
A later version for the ranch list page with more functionalities:
One of the first sketches for the flow of creating a ranch:
The final design:
The design after development:
Supplementary mobile application
To complete the flow of the broker that is in charge of the installation process of the hives as well, I designed a mobile application for the installers that install the hives in the ranches.
This is a complete project in itself but here is a sneak peek of the mobile application I designed:
Conclusions
After we developed the application and got real feedback from the brokers we changed a few features and added abilities they didn’t have before. For example, we added more edit options to the map when they create a ranch, like adding the option to mark road blocks or gates on the map.
We also added the ability to select a beekeeper for a ranch from the mobile app since we understood that sometimes the installer does it from the field and not the broker.
In addition, we removed the yellow dot in the mobile app that indicates the installer where he should drive next since we learned the installers drove wherever they wanted anyway and ignored our indication we initially thought would be helpful, and more.
