Discovery, UX & Product Design, and Content
FLINTpro is a start-up whose background stems from the scientific implementation of data modelling to assess historical and future emissions from the impact on land due to any event. An example of an event might be a fire, a period of rain, or forest clearing.
With a SaaS platform designed to manage, analyse, and report on land-based carbon emissions data,
FLINTpro integrates various data sources to help users monitor and verify changes in carbon stock and greenhouse gas emissions across several land-use change scenarios and commodities.
In this case study, I will focus on my role in optimising the existing application and conducting discovery and design to inform simpler, scalable products.
Having secured a round of funding, FLINTpro directed its focus to scale its product globally, especially in the USA and EU.
There were a few issues, however. The organisation didn’t know who its ideal customer was and did not believe it had competitors to threaten market share. Moreover, the existing product was only usable by highly specialised geographic information system (GIS) practitioners, requiring extensive training and support for new users, and limiting its adoption.
Introduced a Human-Centred Product Design approach that significantly reduced new product complexity, resulting in a more intuitive and user-friendly interface.
Improved data visualisation tools, enabling users to quickly and accurately interpret complex datasets, which facilitated faster and more informed decision-making.
Reduced the resource cost of application onboarding and ongoing support by 50%, making the onboarding process more efficient and reducing the burden on support teams.
Implemented a scalable design framework that allows for future enhancements, ensuring the product can adapt to evolving user needs and market demands.
On joining the organisation, FLINTpro had a SaaS application that doubled as an internal tool for consulting to Carbon Project Developers, Governments, NGOs and the Ag sector.
I immersed myself in the business on several fronts.
I introduced the team to Human-Centred Design practices, conducting workshops to identify end users needs and to gain a shared understanding of their context, pains and gains.
I helped the team transition to Miro, Slack, Notion, Dovetail and Google Docs to streamline our product workflows, and established a 2-week sprint cadence with key rituals to enable better transparency and promote accountability within the team.
Facilitating a series of workshops such value proposition canvas and user journey mapping.
Modelling human centered design principles changed the team's approach to a user-first perspective - a departure from the academic discussions that yielded overly complex solutions that did not align to users mental models.
I embarked on an investigation of several solution providers in direct competition with FLINTpro and in adjacent sectors.
This exploration provided:
This understanding informed ongoing product definition and market fit.
My immersion into the organisation included a deep dive into the FLINTpro application. It quickly became apparent that best practice design was urgently needed.
I took several approaches to the deep dive. These included:
Conducting a full application heuristics and best practice audit in the Miro
The audit highlighted several key issues. These included:
With a user-first lens, I worked with our team to learn from previous, existing and prospective users to understand context, goals and pain points.
Key activities included:
"Getting a whole of operations emissions footprint is challenging due to lacking or inconsistent data."
"We can now report our Scope 1 emissions, but beyond the farm gate is still a future ambition."
"It takes me around 16 days to get a result. From sampling soil carbon to running the simulations with other inputs."
Optimisation of the existing system included addressing key issues identified during onboarding and immersion. I identified the following ‘quick wins’ that could easily be implemented to resolve fundamental usability issues.
I mapped out user flows to understand the end-to-end experience for users in the application. This allowed me to:
I illustrated ideas that I shared with the team. This process allowed me to:
Optimised iteration of the complex simulations flow
I consolidated a core set of components and their various states when converting flows and UX to user interface designs. This I did in Axure to start with low fidelity wireframes before moving to Figma to define high fidelity UI components.
An earlier list of simulations. Note the list of actions, not all of which are available for their respective instance.
Optimised card components redesigned to scale and display only necessary attributes.
Components for FLINTpro's fledgling design system.
Mapping simplified and intuitive data visualisation based on complex hierarchy.
Exploring future-state concepts to consolidate the interface and simplify browsing.
I worked with the Product team to define artefacts to support the newly formed Sales team with which to explore market opportunities.
My input into the product definition and development spanned across existing optimisation and new product development, where my impact significantly steered the organisation.
Whilst much of the product market fit is still being explored, my impact to the current application is well understood.
