We created an interactive web app!
21st Century Farming
This year we’ve made new moves into agriculture and iFarming!
What is iFarming? You’d be correct if you’d guessed intelligent farming: a highly data driven approach to planning and managing agriculture.
Don’t worry, we’ve not swapped our Macs for Masseys, just yet…
But we have welcomed a new client Agrii to the fold. Agrii lead the way in agronomy technology and strategic advice for farmers. As leading innovators in their ..’field’ (sorry), they wanted a smart web app that would bring to life their digital content with market leading style and innovation.
Client Objectives
Agrii wanted an events platform that allows farm managers to quickly identify content and updates for their chosen areas of interest based on crops, location, soil and geography, throughout the summer months when Agrii’s crop trial data really ripens.
Liquona’s Interactive Digital Map
People process visual content far more quickly than written content. So why are websites so full of words still? In keeping with our belief that pictures say more than words, we proposed a ‘visual first’ approach to navigating the content. This was based around a ‘hero piece’ homepage 3D animated interactive map of the UK. On this map users could explore and filter their preferred interest areas, identify the sites that were most of interest, then move on to that site’s page and the content they wanted.
Always focused on the user experience, the map needed to feel right and be playful to encourage engagement.
Right from the off the map which fills the screen, moves in to position to make it clear to the user that this 3D model is alive and ready to play. Gulls fly overhead, a satellite drifts across the stratosphere and icons spin to face the viewer. Every click initiates an action… even the gulls call when clicked on. What better way for users to learn than through interactive and immersive experiences?
Rendering the Web App
Recent versions of browsers and operating systems now allow for effective ‘Browser Rendering’. Browser rendering allows our 3D assets to be generated live on the user’s screen. This means that they can manipulate the assets; rotating, moving and manipulated, the browser generates fresh models instantly. Of course, this approach can introduce significant demand on the user’s processor and risk diminishing their experience to a stuttering mess.
Time poor people are more likely to exit a page if the loading time is over 3 seconds (hobo, 2020),
So the trick is to keep the user experience smooth by keeping the processor demand of the rendering as low as possible. Optimising the assets to be a good looking as possible whilst being as small as possible, coding the site to pre-load content before it is clicked on is the tricky part, but it’s what we do!
Virtual menus
Once users clicked through to a site, we maintained the ‘visual first’ approach to place them in a 360 virtual 3D farmyard. Again immediate movement of the scene instantly communicated to the user that this was a moveable and interactive experience, inviting them to click around and explore the content specific to that site.
360 Live Action Videos
As this web app was to replace and supplement live events for users, it was always designed to feel like something special and to keep a sense of place and happening. 360 content is perfect for that.
From Dorset to Scotland, we filmed 360 videos to give the users a strong sense of having visited the farm sites, being there with the experts in the crop trials.
While the trial manager talks the user through the crops and the trial data, the user can look around the field by moving their mouse.
We could make a joke about a field mouse at this point, but that would be …corny.
The Client Said:
Working with Liquona has been great fun. excellent They’re an open and straight talking bunch, which we really appreciate. They really took the time to understand our business, our customers and our objectives. From our first conversation, the team were brimming with ideas and enthusiasm, taking our brief and elevating it to a whole new level. With Liquona’s help we’ve been able to give our customers the information they need in a fun and unique way.
Discover more interactive content we’ve made here.
Learn more about our Web App ventures, and check out our web app services page.