The data led to three specific product decisions that were very influential in our platform. First was the rebranding of the product from Smart-DART to BioRanger. Our customers work is often times not just a job, but part of a long established family owned and run business. As such, they are often stewards of the business, the land, and many times the community. Our platform helps them see through their responsibilities, by protecting their business from harmful diseases and our new brand reflects that.

Secondly, our platform effectually produces test data from which our customers can make more informed management decisions about diseases or microbial contamination. However, those decisions are often times influenced not just by the test data, but other aspects of the operations and also the weather. Hence, we developed a single screen dashboard for the customer to view the test results all while also seeing weather and relevant user-generated operational data through a feed.

Lastly, we redesigned the housing of our handheld device to better align with the working conditions of a farmer or food producer, incorporating materials that improve handling of the device, design elements that provide user feedback and improved usability.

Our platform is currently being used by food producers, researchers, and federal agencies around the world. Combined these customers impact the growing on over 200 million acres world-wide. Our platform is enabling food producers to test for funguses, bacteria, and viruses. It is helping researchers create their own test kits. Our redesign and re-imagining of our platform has further excited those existing customers and have helped us attract new customers as well.

The data from the interviews and observations from the visits were critical in that they framed the product redesign and branding. They set the stage for not only where our product was being used but also how the data it generates is positioned.

Our platform utilizes proprietary chemistry to identify particular gene-markers that are read by the device and have the results of the test displayed through our app. It is an established process in diagnostics, but largely a new one for the food and agriculture industries. Like many other industries the food and agriculture industries are being inundated with data solutions.

We learned from our interviews and visits that unlike other industries, these industries do not sit in city centers or on Twitter. They are not sitting at desks and tethered to their phones. They are on the manufacturing floor or in the field, watching the weather and paying attention to the clouds, the ones in the sky. Their decisions were driven by the ever changing seasons and based on internalized knowledge passed from generation to generation.

So we strove to design, build, and brand our test platform in a manner that does not lay in contradiction to those years of experience nor minimize its value. Rather, our platform and the data it generates builds upon the the tradition. The data from the interviews and the information gleaned from the visits gave us a snapshot into our customer’s world, helping us build a better product for one of the oldest industries.