Leaf Ledger

Across the estate, each plucking section still logged green-leaf weights in paper registers. Supervisors copied those figures into spreadsheets at the end of the week, so wages and factory planning ran days behind the actual harvest.

Lead UX designer

Supervisors needed to capture hundreds of weigh-ins a day, often in the rain, with patchy mobile coverage and a wide range of digital literacy. Any tool slower than a pen and a register would be abandoned within a week.

I spent two weeks shadowing supervisors at weighing sheds, timing each entry and noting where errors crept in. From those observations I built paper prototypes, then a clickable prototype we tested in the field on low-end Android phones. Four rounds of testing narrowed the flow down to a single screen per plucker.

We designed offline-first, syncing whenever a signal appeared, so nothing was lost in low-coverage sections. Large numeric keypads and high-contrast colours replaced text input. Each plucker was identified by photo and section number rather than by typing a name, and every entry could be undone for ten seconds before it was committed.

The pilot sections moved entirely off paper. Supervisors reported that end-of-day reconciliation went from roughly an hour to a few minutes, and the payroll team received weigh-in data the same evening instead of the following week.

Designing on site mattered more than any workshop. Glare, wet hands and a queue of people waiting shaped the interface far more than any stakeholder request. Next time I would involve the payroll team earlier; their export needs caused a late redesign of the sync summary.