Purina
Paperless Horse Feed & Supplement Trial Tracking
Role
Lead Product Designer
Rest of Team
Product Owner, Project Manager, Support Product Designer, Lead Engineer & Team
Lead Product Designer
Product Owner, Project Manager, Support Product Designer, Lead Engineer & Team
The Purina sales team is busy. They are in the field (literally) at horse barns and feed distributors daily. Feed and supplement trials are the number one conversion tool for the sales team, but rely on data collection that historically has been done via pen and paper. You can imagine the amount of misplaced and incorrectly filled out forms.
We designed and developed a sales enablement tool that leaves the paper processes behind and centralizes trial data. This means a streamlined data entry process, easier access to a library of past trials, as well as access to trial data for other business units. We also met the technical requirements of integrating with Power BI and deployment within their existing sales tool, Modus.
The app was launched to 500+ folks in Fall 2024 at Purina’s National Sales Meeting. Initial feedback was extremely positive, with excitement to “finally have a tool like this one after years of inconsistent and old school tracking methodology”.
The team hopes to add support for additional animal species in the near future.
Purina came to us with their goals and objectives, as well as some initial requirements for the app. With that in mind, our initial workshop was designed to align our teams and fill in the details by defining users and their needs; main user flows and data capture requirements; and short, medium, and long-term goals for the application.
We took a JTBD approach to understanding our users so that we could focus on why they’ve hired this app, along with the greater context surrounding their app experience.
We outlined the journey for our primary user – the salesperson. This exercise allowed us to align on the sales process, and unveil opportunities to make it better via the app.
The app is broken out into 3 main flows: creating a new trial, updating ongoing trials, and viewing a library of past trials. The Purina team came to us with a long list of requirements for data capture, and together we architected the data entry process to make it as seamless as possible by mirroring their existing sales process. This included streamlining how the sales team captures data by creating efficiencies like auto-filling data that the system already knows.
To aid adoption, we built the new application right into a tool that the sales team is already using. This means nothing new to download and no new accounts to create; user authentication happens right through their existing sales tool, Modus.
We outlined the 3 main flows: creating a new trial, updating ongoing trials, and viewing a library of past trials.
As we developed lo-fi wireframes, we also architected the data entry process.
Since trial data isn't entered all in one session, we broken the data collection into sections that mirror how a trial occurs. For example, during the early prospecting a sales person is collecting information about the barn while they are building a relationship with the barn manager/horse owner. In the app, the sales person can go to the "Barn Info" section and fill out only that information.
Later on (days or weeks later), once the barn manager/horse owner has agreed to a trial, they can enter details about the feed or supplement they will be trialing by navigating to "Ration Details". Breaking the form up ensures that we don't overwhelm either party, while collecting necessary data at the right time.
Check out this end-to-end walkthrough of the application, created in Figma.
The visual design of the app was kept clean and simple, with small touches of Purina branding, due to it being an internally facing tool. The only client facing piece of the tool is a PDF that is generated once a trial is completed.
Given more time and budget, we would have liked to design an interface within the app for trial results, rather than generated a PDF. Ideally, we could show data visualizations on the improvements that the horse has made.