Axle
Axle
Bringing farming into the technological revolution
Axle is an interactive application that brings your tractor into the 21st century by allowing you to remotely complete tasks all around your farm while keeping full control of what your tractor is doing and where your tractor is.
Axle allows you to keep track of what your tractor is up to and how long it has until the current task is completed. You can also rearrange tasks in the order you would like them to be completed while also creating new tasks. This tasks system works in a similar way to how a music playlist would work, allowing you to rearrange, pause, stop and skip tasks.
Within Axle you can fully monitor what your tractor is doing. In the monitoring tab, you can access and view point of view cameras places around the tractor. You can also access a birds’ eye view map of the tractors route along with a heat map of the farm.
The goal of Axle is to provide farmers with a way to autonomously decrease physical labour on a farm while also enhancing the efficiency of working on a farm.
THE DESIGN PROCESS
Research
Our user group consisted of full time farmers, people that farm as a hobby and people that want to become famer.
Interviews and surveys were used to gather research on where our autonomous technology would be best applied on farm. Interviews with farmers allowed us to gain an in-depth view of what a farmer does on a daily basis and where autonomy would be most useful.
With qualitative data gathered from interviews with farmers, numbers and statistics on autonomous technologies used on a farm were needed. Our aim was to find out if farmers wanted and/or needed autonomy on a farm. However, it was challenging to get a hold of enough farmers to gather a large amount of data. Eventually we turned to Reddit. Reddit is an online link sharing website that has pages for almost anything, including a page dedicated to farming, so I made a post explaining our project and linked a survey.
With data collected, we then synthesized our data and developed our user needs. Our user needs were: The product must make farming more efficient for the farmer while reducing physical labour. The product must also allow the farmer to have full control over the vehicle when necessary.
Low Fidelity prototyping and initial tests
Paper prototyping crucial in learning and understanding what users found hard and what they excelled at. The main goal for the paper prototyping phase was to test the fundamentals of the app and how the user interacts with key features of the app. The key features that were easy to understand were kept the same while the features users found hard to interact with were iterated upon.
We iterated the concept multiple times over paper then again with wireframes. We used Pop to click through the pages on an actual phone, this really helped our users test as it put all the pieces of paper in the context of a phone application. We then put users in the environment of a farm and asked them to complete tasks for each concept. This gave us a necessary insight into how users interacted with the app when it wasn’t the main focus for them. This revealed new problems that would have been impossible to find in a controlled environment such as the lounge room of my house. For example, we found that users found it difficult to see the screen in direct sunlight due to the colours we had chosen. This lead us to iterate on the aesthetics of the app and implement a design that both looked pleasing while also being useable outdoors.
high fidelity prototyping and final iterations
Over 1,500 animations and 35 different pages later, the final prototype of Axle looked aesthetically pleasing and ran nice and smoothly.
Design decisions
Throughout the design process many design choices were made, most importantly, the main navigation of the app. Axle uses a hexagon icon to determine what page the user is on. The can interact with the hexagon to change between pages. The can also hide the icon by pressing the down arrow beneath it. At first, we applied a traditional tab navigation bar on the screen that would allow the user to change pages, however, through user testing, user found that there were way too many icons within the navigation bar and that there should either sub headings for some pages or to just combine some pages.
However, these potential fixes to the overwhelming navigation bar actually challenged our user need of allowing the user to maintain full control over the tractor, as it impacted how much information and controls we could keep on each page.
Our solution to this problem was to ditch the traditional navigation bar for a hexagon slider navigation. This treated every page equally and allowed us to make use of the extra real estate we had on each screen. Users could still click the menu button on the top left and jump to the page they were looking for. Otherwise, each page had been set out in the logical order they would be used in. Users found that this iteration was the easiest to understand and navigate.
Reflections
As a final reflection on the project I believe more time could have been spent on the research of our users and the overall concept ideation could have been less linear. We could have started with more out of the ordinary ideas just to see what we features or user interactions we could learn from and possibly implement in our final concept. I would have also liked to iterate more on the final concept as I believe there is still room for improvement on Axle.