Redesigning an AI-powered agriculture solution to enhance user interface and cut development costs

With the help of this solution, Gamaya wanted to gain new customers and expand to new markets. When they turned to us they already had an MVP of this product. But as it often happens with companies in an early stage of development, at the time they were building it, Gamaya’s founders were limited in time and resources, so they didn’t pay much attention to the UI/UX design.

As an outcome, the MVP’s user interface was clunky and confusing, in other words inconvenient for new customers. Too many options, a variety of information to learn, complex navigation – every step the user took would add to their cognitive load.

To be able to grow and reach their goals, Gamaya team needed to improve their product. As they didn’t have in-house designers, they needed to find UI/UX professionals to join their team and help make the software intuitive and easy to interact with.

Rethink the entire UI and optimize the UX. But make it easy to implement for developers

When we looked at the Gamaya’s MVP, we, like any designer, wanted a complete overhaul. We wanted to minimize the interactions and clean up the user interface to help the user comprehend the needed information comfortably.

But to implement some of our design decisions, developers would have to write custom code. This would add up to the overall project costs and become a burden for the Gamaya's team that lacked technical resources.

So, we decided to change our design approach to meet the client’s requirements and gave up custom elements in favor of rapid development.

A UI component library saved countless hours of development work

Gamaya's app is built on React, one of the best frontend tools for building web user interfaces. It has a component-based architecture, which means developers can create reusable components and assemble existing ones in various combinations. This strategy reduces software development time, making it faster and more affordable to release a web application.

To redesign the Gamaya's app and at the same time reduce the time and effort of web developers, we found a solution in technology.

We adapted our design to this library

To help developers implement needed design components using Ant Design, we prepared a UI kit and taught developers how to use it.

We wrote a small guide with links to the Ant's components and ran a demo session, where we explained how to implement complex components. We also tried to implement some of them ourselves to make sure it was feasible.

This way we saved Gamaya's development team the time and hassle of making changes in development.

The results of redesigning Gamaya data visualization and analysis platform

As we already mentioned, Gamaya uses two types of data sources to give customers knowledge about their crops:

• Open source NASA remote sensing satellite data

• Drones with digital imaging capabilities that give farmers a more detailed picture of their fields in a specific location. When the data from drones gets uploaded to the system, Gamaya analyses the photos and glues them together in the right order.

Layers to show data from different data sources

A user can choose what data they want to see: open-source data or images taken by drones. We made these options accessible through Layers.

For example, a tobacco company or a sugarcane producer can use Gamaya to track plant growth stages and observe the impact of viruses or drought on the plants in real-time.

The images taken from drones show planting gaps (highlighted red on the screenshot below):

Tables as an alternative data visualization option

Users can also track information across different fields in various locations using tables:

Flight calendar to schedule drone missions

Farmers can order drones to monitor their fields through the app. We designed a special calendar that reflects the information on where the drone must fly, plus when and what they need to check during their flight mission.

Scouting mobile app and a user interface for the manager

Other than open-source data and drone images, farmers can also get the information about their fields by employing scouts who inspect fields and record agronomic issues by uploading photo footage to the system.

We made a convenient user interface for the scout that allows them to upload photos and comment on the problems they found.

A manager then can analyze the scout's images through the Gamaya's user interface:

Expanding the Gamaya platform to the golf course monitoring

To spread the product to a new market, the Gamaya team came up with an idea to create a small product for golf clubs. Using the data from drones that get uploaded on the Gamaya platform, golf club owners can have a bird’s-eye view of their entire golf course and study its health.

They can analyze the irrigation and identify problems across the entire golf course. Being able to know which areas require more maintenance than others allows the golf course managers to deploy resources appropriately.

Reusing materials to create a brand new product

To design this product we used the main platform as a basis. We cut unnecessary elements keeping a large part of the design unchanged. This way our client's team saved a great amount of time, costs, and resources. They basically built two products at the cost of one.

Design is a never-ending process

During the three-month engagement, we overhauled the user interface and optimized the user experience making it cleaner and more pleasant to work with. We changed the UI using ready-made components that led to minimum work on the developer's side. This way, in addition to making the product more user-friendly, we helped the Gamaya team reduce the cost of software development.

As a result, Gamaya decided to prolong our collaboration, making Eleken their remote "in-house" designers, helping them achieve their long-term goals. We continue working together designing new features and improving the existing ones as design can’t be finished, it evolves together with your goals and your customers’ needs.

The designs met the requirements and expectations of the internal team. Eleken responds quickly to inquiries and is willing to adapt where necessary. The team is hard-working and collaborative, facilitating a smooth workflow.

Evgeny Bogdanov, Head of Software /