Case Study: Redesigning the User Experience of a National Commodities Contracts Platform

by Tom Helvick

From time to time, we like to share case studies of what we’ve been working on here at Intertech. It gives insight into the type of work we do, what you can expect if you work with Intertech to solve your software needs, and what it’s like to work as a consultant for Intertech on challenging projects.

Our most recent case study surveys the work we’ve done over the past six months of a long-standing contract with a national energy and agriculture client. Recent releases prioritized the complete redesign of the client’s Grower Experience Portal for managing grain, wheat, and corn contracts. Our Intertech consultant created stylesheets and reusable Angular components to make the application mobile-friendly for users while also making it easier to develop new features.

Responsive User Experience

Farmers and co-ops across the country use the client’s application to track and manage the delivery of commodities from field to elevator. Recently, feedback from users revealed challenges in the user experience. Most notably, farmers often tried to access information from phones or tablets while out in the field. However, the existing application was not mobile-friendly. It relied on tables to display data, leading to a clunky experience of zooming and horizontal scrolling to locate information.

Our consultant led the effort to completely overhaul the Grower Experience Portal’s styling. Working with the client’s development team, the consultant implemented SCSS stylesheets that enabled imports and variables for commonly used config settings. From 8 separate style sheets, our consultant consolidated down to a single global style sheet for the application.

In addition, Intertech led the effort to refactor the user interface into reusable Angular components. These components were card-based to display cleanly on mobile. Instead of copy-pasting code as they had previously, the components could be created once and reused across the application. The component-based architecture led to a more seamless experience on mobile and performance benefits on page load.

Learn More

To find out more about our project with this client, check out our newly released case study. To hear about other solutions we’ve implemented for past clients in wide-ranging industries, dive into our past case studies.

Find out how Intertech’s consulting services can help your business. Get in touch today to learn more.

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Originally published at Intertech Blog.