How ChatGPT can help agritech build better user experiences.

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When it comes to designing user experiences in agriculture, there's no substitute for human creativity and expertise. But what if there was a tool that could help prompt your thinking and inspire new ideas? That's where ChatGPT comes in.

If the AI buzz hasn't already swept you up, ChatGPT is a language model that uses deep learning to generate human-like responses to text prompts. While it's not a replacement for an experience designer, it can be a powerful tool to help spark ideas and prompt user-focused thinking. 

We've been experimenting with ChatGPT and have discovered some exciting ways agritech businesses can utilise the tool. In this article, we'll use a generic farm management software company as an example to showcase how ChatGPT can be used to help design user experiences.

Get a first opinion.

We let ChatGPT know that we were an agritech start-up that had recently launched farm management software but struggled to convert customers to our paid service. To keep answers brief, we asked for the top 3 things we could do to convert more users. 

Offering a clear value proposition, implementing effective onboarding and providing excellent customer support were the three suggestions we got back. Keep in mind that ChatGPT's recommendations may not apply to your situation, but they can serve as a starting point to prompt your thinking. You should concentrate on identifying the right problem to solve, not just any problem. For this exercise, we decided to go with onboarding as our area of focus.

Map out an onboarding experience.

We asked ChatGPT to map out the walkthrough on an onboarding experience for the farm management software, and it came back with a 14-step process! The process includes farm-specific information, such as creating farm profiles, assets, and relevant features, which can help new users quickly understand how to use the software and its benefits.

These steps could be used as a baseline to measure against your current onboarding experience. You might even discover new steps or features you hadn't considered before and test to see if they'd bring value to your users. ChatGPT has also kept in mind our original problem - struggling to convert free customers to paid customers and refers back to that with this walkthrough. This is something that we often fail to do. We dive into finding solutions and ideas and forget to ground ourselves with the problem we are actually trying to solve.

Get creative.

Next, we wanted to see what creative ideas ChatGPT could develop to make the onboarding experience more engaging for users.

Our favourite ideas generated were specific to farm management and included:

• Creating a simulated farm environment where users can practise using the app.
• Personalised content based on the user's farm size, location or type.
• Offering incentives like a subscription discount or a gift card to a farming supply store for completing a certain amount of onboarding steps.
  

These ideas are springboards to developing and testing creative concepts within your product experience. However, we advise you to validate potential solutions first before investing time and resources into recommendations from AI tools. 

Copy that informs users.

Too often, we see ambiguous error messages that fail to provide users with clear instructions on how to rectify the issue. Statements such as 'Configuration update could not be sent' or 'Element MINI.PORT2_PERIOD is undefined in a CFML structure referenced as part of an expression' (yes, we have indeed encountered this error message!) can cause confusion and make it challenging for users to determine their next steps.

We asked ChatGPT to help us write a user-friendly error message. 

The suggested message tells the user why there is an issue, how to resolve it, and what to do if they get stuck. It's a great example of how an error message should be formatted. 

On the flip side, success messages are just as important to reassure users when something goes right. 

ChatGPT delivers a great example and provides the reasoning behind its suggestion. So not only are you getting some example copy, but you're also educated on the right way to write a message which will help you next time. 

Prompts for agritech.

Finally, we asked, "What prompts would you recommend agritech businesses give you to help them with their user experience?". Here are some of the answers you can try yourself with ChatGPT:

1. "How can we optimise the user interface of our livestock management software to make it more user-friendly?"
2. "What are some creative ways to use data visualisation to help farmers better understand their crop yields?"
3. "How can we improve the search functionality in our precision agriculture software to make it more intuitive and efficient?"
4. "What are some ways to design an effective notification system that alerts farmers of critical events in real time?"
5. "What are some creative ways to use gamification to encourage farmers to adopt sustainable farming practices?"
6. "How can we make our soil management software more user-friendly for farmers with varying levels of technical expertise?"
   

Summary.

Using ChatGPT is a powerful way to help inspire creative solutions to improve agritech user experiences. In our examples, we got a fresh perspective on our onboarding experience and generated innovative ideas for enhancing conversion rates.

We must remember that ChatGPT is just a tool, and its recommendations should be validated through user testing and experimentation. It's essential to keep the user's needs at the forefront of any design decisions and use ChatGPT to complement human expertise, not replace it.

We'd love to know how you're using ChatGPT in your processes - drop us a line at hello@bostudio.nz to let us know!