PastureMap

PastureMap is a highly complex SaaS product that helps ranchers model the productivity of their land and estimate sustainable levels of stocking density over the season. (Several of our developers said it was the most complex data model they’d ever seen.) My job was to take this data and make it easy for ranchers to both collect and digest it. One of the main issues we faced is that much of the rancher community still like to do their planning and tracking with pen and paper. The lack of signal in remote areas, the legacy nature of the average rancher’s smartphone, and the highly fluid nature of their operations made designing a usable, digital system a unique challenge.

My role was designing the interface for web, iOS, and Android. I also took a lead in determining what products to focus on. I created low-fidelity prototypes, did many, many rancher interviews and demos, did stints on customer support, wrote all the interface copy (including our educational panes), deployed Intercom walkthroughs, and even designed our print materials, trade show displays, and swag.

A 400% Jump in Successful Sign Ups?

My first project with PastureMap was reworking the sign-up process. Over the years a number of “helps” had been put in place to assist users in getting through the registration and initial pasture drawing process. The trouble was these helps had been put in piecemeal without considering the whole process. Things had gotten cluttered and there were too many distractions from the main goals: collect user info and get them to create their first pasture.

I pitched stripping everything out of the registration process that wasn’t absolutely necessary. This eliminated several personal data fields, the Intercom assistant popup, user cues suggesting alternative ways to find their ranch, marketing imagery, and a lot of verbiage. Once the process had been decluttered, we saw a sustained 400+% increase in successful registrations.

Pricing

One of the redesigns I worked on was the pricing page. After talking with our Sales team I discovered that we’d never self-served a subscription. In other words, every paying customer had contacted us in order to subscribe. I worked with the Sales team to retool the subscription page so that it sold PastureMap the way the Sales team sold it: upfront monthly sticker shock, then cost breakdown per head, then cost per year, all within a simple calculator tool. Once we released it, we went from 0% self-served subscriptions to 15% self-served.

Grazing Chart

One of the key features I created for PastureMap was the grazing chart. Grazing charts are used in ranching as pencil and paper charts that ranchers constantly scribble on and then erase and make adjustments throughout the grazing season. The trouble is even the best ranchers can’t keep up with them. Since PastureMap tracks ranchers’ cattle moves we could display much more accurate data for them and make it easily editable.

The grazing chart is a pretty complex feature because the nature of ranching is so variable. Multiple herds of ever-changing size and forage requirements are grazing across pastures of varying size, forage quality and quantity, varying recovery periods and ecological aspects, unpredictable rainfall, and a shifting economic market. The ranchers’ educational levels and management methods are as varied as the number of ranchers themselves. This was a big struggle for us because our core customers wanted to see more data front and center while the majority of ranchers didn’t even have categories for the data types we were trying to display. They were happy with basic mapping features but didn’t want to pay much for it. The TAM (Total Addressable Market) of ranchers who really knew what we were doing, knew how to use our data, and were willing to pay high amounts was extremely small, but we were highly valued by those customers. The rest of the ranchers didn’t see the value in what we offered, but there were far more of them. It remained a vexing problem.

Working on the Big Issues

For the final 6 months of PastureMap’s active development I was given control of the product direction and I worked toward streamlining the onboarding flow to ensure that ranchers understood the value of PastureMap and could actually become successful with it earlier. Our two big issues were:

1. Customers didn’t understand the value proposition. They’d register, create pastures, maybe create a herd and place it in a pasture, but then they wouldn’t move the herd. Many that I interviewed just didn't understand the value of keeping up with record keeping or what PastureMap’s basic value proposition was. Using Inspectlet and MixPanel, I saw that it was clear that users dropped out of the product about halfway through the sign up funnel. I created a call script and called every new customer for a month to ascertain why they were getting stuck. The resounding reason was that they just didn’t understand what the software could do. They didn’t know where we were taking them.

2. It took a customer an entire year of using PastureMap before we could really give them serious, actionable data. PastureMap takes user data from how they’ve grazed X animals across Y pasture for Z time and calculates how much forage was there. Then we begin calculating recovery days and so on and help build up a picture of how much forage a ranch has in a given season. But this takes a lot of time and commitment before the data starts being valuable.

I first tried tackling these problems through integrating Intercom walk-throughs into several places in the app to help nudge users toward the next steps they’d need to do to be successful. This resulted in a doubling of our conversion rate, from 0.8% to 1.5%.

Secondly, I worked to integrate NRCS grassland forage estimates to help pre-populate pastures with some of the data it would take us a year to provide. This would create immediate value for ranchers because getting their local NRCS agent to survey their ranch and provide forage numbers per pasture is a months- or years-long process. If we could provide this data as soon as they drew a pasture, we’d have a significant baseline for data prediction as well as provide a huge WOW moment for ranchers. In interviews, ranchers responded enthusiastically to the concept and the early wireframes of the idea.

Unfortunately, these pieces were all put in place during the last month and PastureMap went through a pivot and we couldn’t circle back to study the effectiveness of what we’d implemented. Although our sales continued to climb, they just couldn’t climb fast enough to justify the cost of development.

I still love the PastureMap product we built and I loved working with the ranchers and my teammates. I think my head will be swimming for years with ideas for streamlining the product into something every rancher could use and could get immediate value from.

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