Big data applications with greater ease of use for livestock farmers in the barn

CRV is a leading, international co-operative that provides services for improving dairy cattle. An important tool is the 'Dairy manager' software suite. By using this tool farmers can maintain data about all their animals in order to optimally manage the herd. Over time, the software became quite complex. Therefore, CRV wanted a new design that focused on ease-of-use also in the dairy shed.

Stables, machines and the cows are all equipped with computers that generate a constant flow of data. This enables dairy farmers to monitor and control their growing businesses. Dairy farmers are practical people. Therefore, the applications to support their work must be practical as well.

In order to design practical applications, one needs to know what happens in reality. Therefore, we put on our boots and visited farms to interview farmers about their work, and learned how software applications could support them better. Next, we redesigned the existing suite module-by-module.

Over the course of our collaboration, CRV has become increasingly convinced of the importance of design, with a focus on ease-of-use. We have been able to help them with UX design for apps, and with both service design and UX design for entire software suites. Now we are playing a role as CRV transforms itself into an organization that is better aware of how customers and users should be central to the development of new digital services.

A new application that we have designed together with CRV supports breeding efforts with genetic data. We are proud to report that this was awarded the international Dairy Herd Management Innovation Award at the World Dairy Expo.

CRV is a textbook example of a company that has grown from a traditional sector into an information specialist. With our help, CRV is now becoming a design-driven organization. As a result, user experience has become a systematic organizational element during application design and development. The purpose? Optimal support for passionate dairy farmers, everywhere in the world.