How Phenomenon Studio Built the Farm Management Web App That Agronomists Refuse to Work Without
By Iryna Huk — Project Manager Lead, Phenomenon Studio February 18, 2026 AgriTech Farm SaaS Dashboard UI
Key Takeaways
- AgriTech digital tools fail in the field — literally — because they are designed for demo environments, not sunlit outdoor screens with gloved hands and spotty LTE. HarvestIQ was designed for the actual conditions agronomists work in, not the conditions they work in when reviewing a vendor pitch.
- Commissioning web app development that starts with a field research sprint rather than a feature list is the single biggest differentiator between AgriTech products that get adopted and those that get downloaded once.
- In my analysis of four AgriTech platform engagements at Phenomenon Studio between 2022 and 2025, platforms built with genuine field-condition user research reduced post-launch support ticket volume by an average of 44% compared to those designed purely in a studio environment.
- HarvestIQ launched with 340 farms live across Poland, Romania, and Hungary — not a pilot cohort, a production rollout — 12 weeks after the discovery kick-off call.
The most common failure mode in agricultural technology is a specific and preventable one. A team builds a product in a city office. They demo it on a high-resolution monitor under controlled lighting with a fast broadband connection. The product works beautifully. Then it goes into the field — into the hands of an agronomist standing in a sun-drenched cereal field in July, running an Android handset with 2G signal, wearing work gloves that make precise taps on small UI elements essentially impossible — and it becomes immediately clear that nobody on the design team has ever spent a morning in that situation.
HarvestIQ is a farm management and agronomy reporting platform built for precisely that situation. The founding team — two agronomists and a software engineer who had spent years watching farm advisors struggle with paper notebooks, WhatsApp photos, and Excel spreadsheets assembled into client reports at 10 PM — came to Phenomenon Studio with a brief that was unusually well-specified. They knew the user. They knew the pain. What they needed was a team that could translate that knowledge into a web app that would survive real field conditions and still feel like a genuinely modern piece of software. We built HarvestIQ in 12 weeks. Here is how, and why it worked.
HarvestIQ field observation dashboard and agronomy report builder — designed for outdoor use, offline capability, and a 12-week delivery by Phenomenon Studio.
Case Study — HarvestIQ AgriTech Platform
Client: Three-person founding team (2 agronomists, 1 engineer), pre-seed, targeting commercial farm advisory businesses in Central and Eastern Europe.
Brief: Replace the paper + WhatsApp + Excel reporting workflow used by farm advisors with a field-ready web application for logging observations, processing sensor data, and generating client-facing agronomy reports.
Constraints: Must function offline in the field. Must be usable with work gloves on a mid-range Android device. Must support white-label deployment for reseller partners. 12-week delivery, €140,000 budget.
340 farms live on production rollout at launch
−67% time to complete a client agronomy report
91% weekly active user rate at 60 days post-launch
Field Research Before Figma
In my project records, HarvestIQ’s discovery phase is the one I most frequently reference in pitches to other AgriTech teams — because it is the clearest example I have of field research changing the product in ways that could not have been anticipated from a user interview conducted in a meeting room.
We sent two of our UX researchers into the field with three working agronomists for three full days before opening Figma. We observed real observation logging sessions in a cereal crop rotation site in southern Poland. We watched an advisor try to record a pest observation using a competitor’s app while wearing standard agricultural gloves in 32-degree heat. The experience was an object lesson in the gap between “mobile-friendly” and “field-ready.” The competitor’s app was responsive. The tap targets were technically accessible. In practice, with gloves on, under direct sunlight on a screen with a mediocre outdoor visibility rating, the interface was borderline unusable.
We came back from that field visit with eight design requirements that were not in the original brief — minimum touch target sizes, contrast ratios calculated for outdoor visibility rather than accessibility compliance, a camera interface that could be triggered with a single large tap rather than the standard camera icon, and an offline mode that was not a secondary feature but the assumed default state of the application.
Question → Direct Answer
How do you design a web app for users who work outdoors with limited connectivity?
Design for offline first, connectivity second. HarvestIQ used a service worker strategy that cached all essential app functionality locally, allowed full observation logging and photo attachment in offline mode, and synced to the server automatically when connectivity resumed — with a visible sync status indicator that told the agronomist exactly what was pending. The interface contrast ratio was calculated for 80,000 lux outdoor illumination, not a standard 500 lux office environment. Minimum tap targets were 52 pixels. The result was a product that worked harder in the field than in the demo room, which is exactly the reverse of most AgriTech tools.
⚠ Five Mistakes That Kill AgriTech Web Apps Before Farmers Trust Them
- Designing for the demo, not the field. High-fidelity prototypes that look stunning in a pitch meeting and fall apart the first time someone tries to use them with gloves on, outdoors, on a mid-range Android. Field research is not optional in this sector — it is where the real product requirements live.
- Treating offline as a phase-two problem. Agricultural work happens in places where LTE coverage is intermittent at best. Any farm management platform that requires an active internet connection for core functionality will be abandoned the first time a signal drops mid-session. Offline-first architecture must be a day-one requirement.
- Building for farmers instead of for farm advisors. The actual power user of most farm management software is not the farmer — it is the agronomist or farm advisor who manages multiple farms simultaneously and produces reports for dozens of clients. Design for the advisor’s multi-farm workflow and farmers benefit automatically. Design for the farmer alone and advisors will find a workaround.
- Confusing visual branding with identity design. Putting a leaf icon in the logo is not brand identity development. AgriTech brand identity requires a strategy that positions the product credibly between the agricultural world (which values practicality and trust over aesthetics) and the technology investment world (which values innovation and scalability signals). Getting that balance wrong costs deals at both ends.
- Scoping the MVP by feature count rather than workflow completeness. A farm management MVP with 12 partial features is less useful than one with 3 complete workflows. HarvestIQ launched with one complete agronomist workflow executed excellently. That focus is what produced 91% weekly active user retention at 60 days.
The Technical Build: PWA, ReactJS, and the Offline Architecture
We built HarvestIQ as a progressive web app using ReactJS on the front end and Node.js with a PostgreSQL backend. The PWA approach was the right call for three specific reasons: it removed the App Store approval dependency for an agricultural software product that would need to push regulatory compliance updates on short notice, it allowed a single codebase to serve desktop browsers for office-based report generation and mobile browsers for field use, and it enabled the offline service worker architecture that was a hard technical requirement from the field research phase.
The report generation engine — the feature the founding team had described as “the thing that will actually get advisors to switch from Excel” — used a Python microservice that took structured observation data and sensor readings and generated formatted PDF agronomy reports with regulatory citation links and intervention recommendations. Building this correctly meant mapping the exact output format that Polish and Romanian agricultural advisory bodies accept for client documentation. Two working days spent on that compliance mapping saved us three weeks of post-launch revision requests.
Brand identity ran in parallel with front-end development from week three onward. The HarvestIQ visual system used a soil-reference color palette — cross-section brown tones offset by a clean sky-blue primary — expressed through a deliberately functional design language that avoided the generic startup aesthetic (abstract geometric icons, bright gradients) that agronomists consistently described as “not serious” in our user research sessions. The Figma component library was delivered with white-label variable documentation, enabling reseller partners to deploy a fully branded instance within hours of onboarding. Strong web app development infrastructure paired with a scalable brand system is what turns a single client engagement into a reseller channel.
“The three days our researchers spent in the field before we designed a single screen saved us more time than any sprint optimization we could have applied later. The offline requirement, the touch target standards, the contrast ratio decisions — none of those would have been in the brief otherwise. You cannot design for a context you have never been in.”
Iryna Huk — Project Manager Lead, Phenomenon Studio | February 2026
What the Numbers Showed After 60 Days
| Comparison Criterion | Prior Workflow (Paper + Excel + WhatsApp) | HarvestIQ at 60 Days Post-Launch |
| Time to complete client agronomy report | avg. 2.8 hours per report | avg. 55 minutes (−67%) |
| Observation logging in field | Paper notebook → photo → WhatsApp → manual entry | Single in-app session, all data structured at source |
| Offline capability | Full (paper) — zero digital offline option | Full — offline PWA mode, auto-sync on reconnect |
| Weekly active user rate (advisors) | N/A (no comparable digital baseline) | 91% at 60 days post-launch |
| Client farms onboarded at launch | N/A — no prior platform | 340 farms across Poland, Romania, Hungary |
| Support ticket volume (UI-related) | N/A | avg. 18 per month across full user base |
| Mobile Lighthouse score | N/A | 87 (field-optimised PWA build) |
*Data from HarvestIQ’s Mixpanel analytics and client operational records. Baseline from founding team’s pre-platform time-tracking audit across 12 advisors over 90 days.
How Phenomenon Studio takes domain-specific SaaS products from discovery to deployed — field research, UX design, development, and brand identity in one process.
Questions About Building AgriTech Products
What is MVP in software development for an AgriTech platform?
A single complete workflow executed without external tools. For HarvestIQ, that meant: log an observation, attach sensor data, generate a client report — fully, in one app session, offline-capable. Features like satellite imagery, predictive yield modeling, and multi-season comparison were real priorities deferred to phase two. An MVP that does one thing excellently converts users. An MVP with ten partial features confuses them.
How do you design a web app for outdoor use with limited connectivity?
Offline-first architecture, WCAG AAA contrast ratios calculated for outdoor illumination, 52px minimum touch targets, and a camera trigger accessible in a single large tap. These are the hard field-condition requirements we identified from three days of in-person observation with working agronomists. They did not appear in the client’s original brief. They were entirely responsible for the 91% weekly active user rate at 60 days.
Can Phenomenon Studio build white-label web development for AgriTech resellers?
Yes. HarvestIQ was architected for multi-tenant white-labeling from discovery — each reseller gets a branded instance with their logo, color system, and subdomain, all powered by the same platform. The Figma design system was delivered with white-label variable documentation so reseller onboarding takes hours, not weeks. This business model requirement was built into the technical architecture on day one, not retrofitted later.
How does Phenomenon Studio approach brand identity for agricultural technology?
AgriTech branding sits between two audiences with different trust signals: farmers and agronomists who are skeptical of generic startup aesthetics, and investors and enterprise buyers who need to see technological credibility. For HarvestIQ we used honest agricultural visual references — soil palette, topographic line motifs — expressed through a clean, functional UI framework. No abstract tech iconography. No leaf-and-circuit clichés. Brand identity that earns trust from the field practitioner first, and the boardroom second.
