Whilst working as a Senior Consultant for ThoughWorks I had the privilege to work on this unique and exciting project. Silent Herdsmen is a technology solution that enables farmers to accurately predict their milk production for each year.

Designing the User Interface

I was responsible for rebuilding the User Interface that farmers would be using to monitor their cows. This project really changed the status quo as the interface had to work in a unusual environment, the milking shed! Well, not all the time, but this was a typical touch point for farmers to check the status as their herd came in for milking. So making sure that the UI was easy to use on a large touch screen was key to the success of the UI.

Usability Testing

We conducted several user research sessions with farmers on site to understand their needs and pain points and continuously improve and refine the UX.

The Process

ThoughtWorks put together a great little video to showcase the project, check it out ...

All environments were built in the Cloud using Amazon Web Services. The technology:

• Backend - Ruby/Sinatra/Postgres SQL
• Frontend - Javascript/EmberJS/D3
• Build/Deploy(Go, AWS, CloudInit, CloudFormation, Ubuntu, RDS)

Check out all the details on the ThoughtWorks website