Farmers B2C mobile app
From paper binders to 15,000 farms
Redesigning a dairy-farm app that farmers wouldn't touch, until it replaced the one tool they trusted: paper.
Afimilk (farm management, app + hardware)
Product Designer, owned the end-to-end UX/UI redesign (mentored by two senior UX researchers)
Field research, contextual interviews, analytics, usability testing, Figma
Agri-tech
Overview
Afimilk's on-the-go app for dairy farmers had near-zero adoption. Over six months I owned the UX/UI redesign from scratch, guided by two senior researchers, grounded in research on real working farms. The redesigned ToGo app went from effectively zero usage to daily field use across nearly all of Afimilk's roughly 15,000 farms in over 50 countries.
Challenge
The app already existed, but farmers didn't use it. They documented their work on paper binders while walking the farm. On an operation with hundreds of cows, that paper was a bottleneck: data wasn't shared, monitored, or connected to anything. The brief looked like a UI refresh. The real question was why a capable app was being ignored.
Discovery & research
With two senior researchers mentoring me, I ran a mixed-methods discovery:
Analytics, at Afimilk HQ: we defined what "a good flow" actually meant, a farmer opening the app, locating a specific cow, and completing a daily task on her (for example, logging a sick cow's condition and treatment). The data showed the opposite: farmers opened the app, located a cow, and left without logging anything. Task completion was effectively zero.
Field visits: we went to working farms and watched farmers move through dirty, busy environments carrying binders and papers.
Contextual interviews with about 15 farm workers, aged 30 to 40, tech-comfortable people who analyze milk data on computers every day. This was not a tech-literacy gap. Their verdict on the app: "we don't get it, sorry."
Field usability testing: when we showed what the app could do, they were surprised by its depth, and still called it too complicated.
The insight: the blocker was never capability or skill. It was cognitive load. Unclear flows, confusing button states, no clear focus, and a wall of brand-blue gradients made a powerful app unusable in the one place it needed to work, the field.
The direction
We reframed the goal. The field doesn't need a feature-rich app; it needs the few things that replace the binder, fast, one-handed, in a messy environment. So I cut the over-built capabilities farmers would never adopt and rebuilt the app around the real on-the-go job, with minimal, high-clarity flows.
Solution
A focused ToGo app built to retire the paper binder:
Daily tasks: the farm's to-dos that need documenting on the spot, like checking a sick cow and logging her condition and treatment, so the record is shared and monitored in real time.
Where-you're-needed notifications: directs the farmer to the right place on the farm.
Hardware integration: connects to the Afimilk wand. Tap a cow's ear or foot tag and her full ID, health, and history appear instantly in the field.
Design principles throughout: minimal clear flows, strong hierarchy, far lower cognitive load, and one-handed use for a working farm.
Outcome
After launch, analytics from the team confirmed the shift: adoption went from effectively zero to daily field use across nearly all of Afimilk's roughly 15,000 farms in over 50 countries, each with at least one farmer using it daily. Onboarding was seamless worldwide, validated firsthand in New Zealand and Italy, with only minor bugs that we resolved immediately. The paper binder was replaced by shared, real-time, connected cow data.
Learnings
As my first full end-to-end redesign, this taught me that the most important design decisions happen in the field, not the file. The win wasn't adding features, it was the discipline to remove them, and to design for a muddy, one-handed, hundred-cow reality.