Create UI design architecture and visual elements for Levno app; integrate service additions.
Nodero experts in UI research, prototyping, and design.
The redesigned Levno app has been successfully extended to new services, consistently applying navigation patterns, dashboard layouts, tiles, and architecture that have been instrumental to user satisfaction and growth.
Key Services
Industry
Winning brands are consistent. Marketing theorists argue that consistency establishes a certain comfort that builds customer trust and loyalty. When pixels and thumb swipes largely define brand experience, presenting a consistent experience that serves a ‘one-track mind’ is critical. World leading agri-tech company Levno turns data into powerful insights and time-critical alerts, enabling its customers – famers and their partners – to monitor on-site factors crucial to productivity.
The company’s app first focused on Milk, providing farmers and dairy processors with insights to improve milk quality and optimise its collection. Building on this early-stage success, Levno mapped its wizardry with real-time measures of temperature, volume and secondary information to other areas on the farm, including water, fuel, and farm feed. Nodero’s UI expert Lucas Woolf architected graphic and navigational elements that define Levno’s app services, ensuring users encounter a familiar experience for every module.
Levno first engaged Nodero when they were obsessing on the fine details of its app – things like date formats, frequency of dashboard updates, numerical scales, and measures. But Nodero’s brief quickly broadened to include new features, login flows, and common design and navigational elements that would map to the firm’s growing portfolio of app services.
Fanatical design and a doggedness to its conventions often limit a UI’s extensibility. Designers must take a more balanced approach, designing a consistently slick graphical experience but with sufficient flexibility so that established ‘look and feel’ extends seamlessly to new functions and services.
“You want a good consistent experience across all your services. You can’t ask users to do things one way and then another in a different part of the app,” Levno’s technical lead Steve Chalmers said. “So, your designer can’t be too precious. Pragmatic is the term I use – Nodero understands our customers well, so they’re able to balance functions that work well for customers with the principles of sound design. I think Nodero nailed it.”
Design flexibility also has flow on effects for app development progress and costs, enabling Levno developers to replicate certain UI elements to other app functions and services without having to defer to Nodero. “There’s a certain amount we can do ourselves, which speeds things up. Often, we're trying to do stuff fast, because all of a sudden the world changes. So, we’re able to adjust as quickly as the business needs us to.”
Like most startups, Levno’s founders know their customers and markets better than most – in fact, it is the founder’s insight that most often inspires their company’s formation. Armed with this IP, Levno is in a strong position to develop and launch new services quickly. The company eschews formal cycles of building, testing, and release, instead drip-feeding changes and updates to its app following rapid cycles of development and internal review. Feedback from actual users provides a reality check and the basis for additional finetuning.
Taking a more instinctive approach to development involves rapid upfront ideation, producing concepts and prototypes to test the veracity of ideas before they take flight. Many are discarded along the way. “Often, when we don't know what we want we turn to Nodero for advice. Nodero is good at creating prototypes based on embryonic thinking,” Chalmers said. “We can very quickly iterate these concepts to develop the MVP (minimum viable product).”
Levno’s lean development model also paves the way for rapid turnaround of high impact improvements. For example, observing user behaviour showed that a floating action at the bottom of screens was rarely used. Similarly, certain header features were commonly ignored, prompting developers to add a ‘learn more’ button, which immediately increased usage four-fold and all but eliminated related support calls.
Nodero UI expert Lucas Woolf worked with Levno developers and company principals, taking a lead role in user profiling, wireframing, prototyping, and UI design prioritising simplicity, clarity, and consistency. Key outputs included:
Nodero has worked with Levno over many years – but only when they’re needed. The on-demand engagement underscores the value of a UI designer who works with extensibility in mind, enabling Levno developers to continue working without direct oversight of the UI designer. Their development team uses a library of design assets and documentation to maintain progress, reengaging Nodero when they need to sense check their work or when they feel development has deviated too far from the original design architecture.
“We receive many customer comments saying that our app is better than the competition. They seem to enjoy our app more – and a certain amount of that relates to the user interface,” Chalmers said.
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