Company
PRODAP
Year
2020 - 2021
Product
PRODAP Views Master
Role
Product Designer
Duration
2 years
Task
Add new features to the product and enhance its interface.
Tools
User Interviews, Grooming Meetings, Wireframes, Figma
Target Users
Cattle farm workers.
Results
The platform now manages nearly 1 million cattle across 1.45M hectares for 190+ clients in Brazil
Research Process
To deeply understand our users and customers, we relied on three primary sources:
The users themselves
PRODAP consultants
The Customer Success team
User needs and characteristics
When designing a solution for these clients, two key points needed special consideration:
Solution Users:
Many farm workers are men with little to no formal education.
Their hands are frequently exposed to rough materials like wood, ropes, and other objects, causing thickened fingers (reducing touch sensitivity).
They tend to behave timidly and hesitantly when using smartphones for work.
Many fear "getting scolded" by the manager if something goes wrong in the pastures.
Usage Context:
Cowboys often inspect pastures and livestock on horseback, leaving one hand occupied with reins.
They work under intense sunlight.
The farms cover vast areas, with large portions lacking internet coverage.
Personas were developed to better understand these user types: one with a more operational role, and another with a more managerial position.
Internal Expertise
PRODAP has a team of expert consultants—including veterinarians, animal scientists, and university professors. These professionals brought deep technical knowledge as well as behavioral insights into how farm employees worked.
This expertise was crucial in helping develop new features and solutions that aligned with both the technical requirements and real-world needs of users.
Customer Success Insights
The Customer Success team played a vital role by:
Collecting user feedback, questions, and pain points
Providing valuable insights to guide product improvements
Providing feature usage data (e.g., frequency of access to different tools)
I routinely analyzed this data to:
✔ Measure the success of new features
✔ Inform backlog prioritization (working closely with the Product Owner and Product Manager)
✔ Guide data-driven product decisions
Above is an example of the interface improvements we implemented. On the left, you see the original MVP screen. On the right, the redesigned version features a more intuitive icon representing the pasture quality assessment question ("How is the grass quality?"), along with visually optimized answer options. Key enhancements include the strategic use of color-coding and symbolic icons—critical changes that significantly improved usability for our target users.
Lessons Learned
One of the most unexpected challenges was behavioral: some farm workers were afraid of being reprimanded for reporting issues like missing animals or pasture damage, which led to false data entries. I learned that building trust and creating a safe environment for honest reporting is just as important as designing intuitive interfaces.
We adapted the interface and messaging to focus on support and improvement rather than blame, helping shift the perception from “surveillance” to “decision support.”
Designing for agricultural environments requires deep empathy—not just for users’ technical needs, but also their emotional context and workplace dynamics.
Working closely with both consultants and field workers gave me valuable perspective on how to make data feel meaningful and non-threatening to different user roles.
Impacts
Recognizing the strategic value of Brazil's thriving cattle industry, global enterprise Royal DSM acquired PRODAP in 2022 to strengthen its agricultural technology portfolio.
Following the acquisition, PRODAP Views Master was rebranded as FarmTell Views. The platform's current impact demonstrates remarkable market penetration:
1.45 million hectares of pastureland digitally mapped
190+ enterprise clients served
478 farms actively using the solution
Nearly 1 million head of cattle under management
After establishing market dominance in Brazil, dsm-firmenich is now extending its agricultural technology solutions across Latin America, with initial launches in Mexico and Uruguay in 2025.
