Everyday communication on a marine farm made trouble-free for the whole organization

Qnappen is a part of the sustainable marine agriculture industry. They operate in Norway and took part in an innovation accelerating program. Qnappen aims to revolutionise the management of fish farming. For now the solution will be applied and tested on a number of fish farms, with great perspectives for scaling of the app with outside users in the near future. We helped Qnappen take their concept from the idea stage to a successful MVP.

The challenge

The client’s vision was to create a task management system that would make the work around sustainable marine agriculture more efficient. The system was supposed to cover among other things: management of fish farm localities with industry-specific features (such as different grid sizes and the number of burs), management of tasks performed with different periodicity, divided into categories, and a special module that serves as a fish health status check. The app was supposed to serve three types of users: Admins, Managers and Aqua-technicians.

The scope of the project also included a new logo for Qnappen, designed by SDH and consistent with Qnappen message of simplicity and functionality.

Product Discovery

We addressed these challenges during the Product Discovery workshops, which allowed us to prioritize apps’ features and propose a long term roadmap of product development. The meetings were conducted fully remotely.

In the course of 3 workshops, we empathized with the future users by mapping their pains and gains. Later on, in the ideation phase, we proposed solutions on how to tackle these needs and most importantly checked our assumptions during the user interviews.

Scope of work

Our role was to create an efficient management platform allowing managers and employees of sustainable fish farms to plan and manage their work on various localities, and communicate with each other on different devices.

The solution

Using the lean approach, we prioritised the key features to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that would let us test our main assumptions defined during the workshops and user testing. We decided that the app should be available as a desktop app for the managers and as a PWA for the aqua-technicians, with restricted permissions.

An intuitive and engaging task management system was created to make the app as user friendly as possible and easy to work with. For now, the app is accessible only through a Microsoft authorisation system, which makes it safer and organisation-based.

Results

Our product is a web application that makes tasks management on a fish farm easier both for the employees and their supervisors. Managers can access the app through a desktop and have an insight into all the localities they manage. They can create and edit localities with features that reflect the actual farms, assign the team members and manage their tasks.

Aqua-technicians that work on site can access the app via a smartphone and use it to manage their tasks and even communicate with each other (with the ability to send images). We’ve managed to create an MVP that covers around 20% of the initial functionality list. Here is a link to the website: qnappen.no

When working on the project we focused on using the most recent technology pieces.

We wanted it to be error-free and we focused on bringing to the platform as many automated tests as possible. The Qnappen technology stack is:

• React
• Redux
• Material UI
• Ruby on Rails
• PostgreSQL
• GraphQL
• Amazon S3
• Slack & Hangouts

Conversation is one of our most important values and a habit we support at every stage of our development process. Conversation is executed through digital tooling so the context is never lost. We use Slack for chat, Jira for planning, and Github for code reviews and discussion.