OnTrack App
Mobile App · Agriculture · March 2026
640,000+ hectares, 12 modules and one phone in an agronomist’s hand.
OnTrack App
Agriculture
Mobile App
The app is live in production and runs on 640,000+ hectares.
%
Task success rate — 7 rounds of usability testing with 4–6 client employees.
5 → 1.5
Minutes to outline a field — moderated session, one field.
sec
Alert reaction time — client feedback.
+
Weekly active users — post-release analytics.
The task
“We want to run our agribusiness from a phone.”
In 2025 a client called me — an agricultural holding in Central Asia. The idea sounded simple. Behind that one sentence stood 12 modules, each with its own settings, parameters and logic, split into two big worlds: scouting and machinery.
The real goal went deeper: a digital footprint of the farm. Crops, machinery, people — year after year. So that at the end of a season you can look back and do better next year.
User research
Who opens this app — and where are they at that moment?
Methods: interviews and usability testing with 4–6 client employees.
01 · Behaviour
Desktop stays the main tool.<br>Analytics, planning and reports live in the office. The phone comes out when something happens.
02 · Scenario
A manager on the road wants to glance, not to work.<br>Open the app for a minute, see how things stand, get an urgent alert and step in.
03 · Environment
The phone is in the sun. One hand is busy.<br>Low contrast and small buttons simply disappear in the field.
04 · UX finding
Viewing and entering data are two different jobs.<br>Some people read dashboards, others enter data from the field. Mix them — and both get worse.
The insight that drove everything: mobile is not a copy of desktop. It is a tool for fast action.
The key insight
One insight drove everything.
The easiest path was to squeeze the desktop into a phone. It was also the worst one. Instead I split the roles: desktop is for analysis and planning, mobile is for reacting and entering data right where that data appears.
Desktop
Mobile
Where
Office, big screen
Field, road, sun
When
On schedule
When something happens
Job
Analyse, plan
React, enter data
Session
Hours
Minutes
Design for the field
An interface you can read in direct sunlight.
Spring
A field you draw with your finger.
<span class="lb" style="margin-bottom:9px">Challenge</span>An agronomist stands next to a new field and has to outline it. On desktop that’s a mouse job. On a small screen, in the sun and on the move, it’s a genuinely hard task.
<span class="lb" style="margin-bottom:9px">Solution</span>I looked at how navigation systems map new roads and objects, and brought that pattern to field mapping. The crosshair stays in the centre and the user moves the map. In the right spot — tap “+ Add” to drop a point. Once the points close, the zone forms and you give the field a name.
Made a mistake? The brush removes the last point. Leave without saving — and the contour is simply discarded.
Weather that looks underground
A regular forecast shows the sky. A farmer needs to know what’s happening in the soil. For every field the app shows moisture by layer — 0–10, 10–30 and 30–60 cm — against the norm and last year, with a slider through the month. Moisture at seed depth is what tells you whether it’s time to sow.
Summer
An alert. And the manager is on the road.
<span class="lb lb--4" style="margin-bottom:1px">Scenario</span>A tractor broke down in one of the fields and needs help. Or a sensor recorded that 40 litres of diesel vanished from a tank right on site.
<span class="lb lb--4" style="margin-bottom:1px">Solution</span>Alerts come in different types, and each one immediately answers the questions a manager would ask: what happened, where, who the driver is, whether they’re assigned, who’s responsible.
Notifications come in three types: alerts (red), warnings (yellow) and info (blue). From any of them you can open the details of what happened — and call the right person straight away.
Anatomy of an alert
Five answers on one card — before the manager has to ask. And one action: call the driver.
What happened
Sensor recorded a fuel drain
Field 135 · 28 ha
Driver
Sam Alarmer
Assigned
Yes · tractor attached to driver
Responsible
Fleet manager
Autumn
Every sowing is a story.
Sown on 5 May, logged in the system. Then everything that happened to the crop: rates, timing, treatments, where and how it was sown. The hard part was making the comparison readable on a phone: each plot is compared with the other plots in the farm’s experience.
At the end of the season the app compares the plan with reality. A chart shows how far we deviated and why — the weather didn’t allow it, or there were other reasons.
In the first year the record can be entered by hand or collected live during the season. The next year it becomes the plan.
Winter
One question instead of twelve modules.
The assistant has all of the farm’s data, so it works as the manager’s personal assistant. It answers any question about the business, gives advice and forecasts — or simply shows where things are in the app.
It lives one tap away on every screen: the little robot in the corner.
What I rejected
Early versions of the map and the reports list didn’t meet users’ needs or weren’t easy to scan at a glance. Most of them carried too much information — we kept simplifying until a version worked in the field.
Design system
Every screen is built from one OnTrack design system: bottom sheets with list variants, buttons with sizes, variants and states, 100+ icons, and map pins for machinery events — from parking to fuel drain.
