Since 2007, Open Country Dairy has grown to become New Zealand's largest independent dairy processor, and the world’s second largest global exporter of whole milk powder. Because dairy farmers are exposed to a highly volatile commodities market, fixing the price for a portion of their milk creates a previously unprecedented level of certainty for their business. After launching Open Country’s Farmer Supplier app in 2016, OCD saw an opportunity to create a new Fixed Milk Price application platform to provide fixed milk price offers quickly, in response to changes in the highly dynamic commodities market. This transformative app allowed farmers to make fixed price offers using mobile technology instead of emails, in real-time, and allowed certainty to happen right through the business value chain.

We conducted user research that discovered the actual needs of farmers and internal stakeholders. A Five-Day Co-Design Sprint with design-thinking workshops challenged the cross-functional team to imagine what the platform might look like. Our Five-Day Co-Design Sprint process is an extremely innovative and effective methodology, bringing farmer suppliers together with subject matter experts and critical decision makers. This allows for the crystallisation of the best possible solution, lightening-speed prototyping, and high fidelity end-user testing. Within five days a working prototype had been designed and built, including a dashboard, farmer offers, customer offers, market insights, and other comprehensive, functional tooling. The power of our process allowed for the successful optimisation of all the work streams that followed.

Following the Five-Day Co-Design sprint, in just 12 weeks we designed and built a minimum viable product and commenced user acceptance testing. The entire platform is custom designed and developed around the optimal Human Experience (HX) for farmer suppliers and internal users. We believe passionately in starting with the ideal HX for end-users, and then reverse engineering the enabling technology. To achieve an outcome of rapid design, fit-for-purpose, we facilitated ongoing communication with internal stakeholders and actual farmers suppliers, testing, redesigning, and retesting, at speed. All stakeholders knew exactly what to expect when the product went live. To achieve the speed required for this project, we set up a DesignOps pipeline, Digital Style Guide and produced high-fidelity designs.

Open Country’s ground breaking Fixed Milk Price Platform means farmers gained the ability to have a say over milk price for the first time. It is the only tool that collates and communicates the amount of data required for a farmer to make truly informed decisions about whether to fix a milk price, creating greater control and reducing risk. The UX and graphic design is elegant, simple, and beautifully intuitive to use, and this is reflected in the client receiving very few requests for technical support at go-live. The app is fully responsive and cross-platform, allowing farmers to access it using their preferred device or browser while the ultimate effect is seen in the result - a dramatic uptake in Fixed Milk Price offers.