The Product Catalog: Helping Experts Choose the Right Product

Role: Senior UX Designer, Nutrien Ag Solutions
When: 2020
Focus: The Employee Experience Hub (EXH)

Introduction

A crop consultant doesn’t just take orders — they prescribe. Choosing the right chemical, seed, or fertilizer for a given field is one of the hardest parts of the job, because it means balancing agronomic fit against cost, performance, resistance management, and years of hard-won knowledge about a specific piece of ground. When we set out to build the product catalog inside the Employee Experience Hub (EXH), the goal wasn’t to make a prettier list of products. It was to support that expert decision. This is the story of how research shaped a catalog built for the way crop consultants actually think.

1. The Problem

Finding the right product was scattered work

Before EXH, the information a consultant needed to choose a product lived everywhere except one place. Active ingredients, resistance information, labels, application timing, and comparisons were spread across manufacturer websites, PDFs, and binders of regional university field guides. Consultants did a lot of this work by hand, or from memory, often with a grower sitting across the desk waiting for an answer.

The design challenge was to bring that scattered knowledge into a single catalog — one organized around how a consultant searches (by crop, by pest, by active ingredient) rather than how the database is structured by default.

2. The Design Process

From partner design sprints to testable wireframes

The work started with collaborative design sprints that included major manufacturing partners like Syngenta and BASF — the people who know these products best. Those sprints turned into testable wireframes: 31 distinct components spread across three pages — a catalog home, a product detail page, and a comparison view. Building it as a set of discrete, testable components meant we could put concrete concepts in front of users and learn which ones matched user’s expectations and needs.

3. Research

User testing during a pandemic

We tested the wireframes in the middle of the pandemic, which meant moving the research remotely. I ran one-hour interviews with seven crop consultants from across the country — from Clinton, Oklahoma to Edmonton, Canada to the Southern High Plains of Kansas — walking each of them through the concepts and asking what they’d actually use.

The response was encouraging, and specific:

“I would use it daily as a research tool. A lot of things I do right now, it would eliminate. Especially if this was in an app, I would religiously use this a lot.” — J. Yost, Crop Consultant

“Any of the work that I normally do by hand is nicely placed here. If I were sitting with a grower in front of me, those are a lot of the questions they would ask.” — A. Halwa, Crop Consultant

Insights gained from these interviews were shared and validated by our design partners who helped us fill in gaps when the research showed we were missing information on the pages. For example, product labels are the best source for understanding restrictions and nuanced differences between competing products but the information in labels is often missing from product catalogs or hidden in pdfs. Unlocking this information was a key to improving the value of our catalog’s product detail pages.

4. What We Designed

A catalog organized around how consultants think

The catalog home led with search, because search turned out to be the primary way consultants expect to find a product — they estimated they’d type a product name straight into the box 50–90% of the time. It was so obvious to them that most didn’t even think to list it among their top-five priorities. Around it we built the entry points they actually reached for: crop-specific catalogs (consultants almost always start with a crop in mind, so the catalog can default to the crops grown in their region) and pest-specific catalogs covering insects, weeds, and diseases, with a pest-identification tool promoted to the homepage rather than buried on a detail page.

The product detail page was where we consolidated everything a consultant used to hunt for. It surfaced active ingredients and resistance management (with active ingredients as links to every product sharing them), label information presented directly on the page instead of inside a PDF, branch inventory availability, application timing shown visually, complementary products, market trends, and a comparison chart.

The comparison chart drew the strongest reaction of anything we showed — every person we interviewed was interested in it, and one already kept a version of it by hand. Their feedback sharpened it: add rate per acre (price is misleading without it), let consultants add and remove columns to customize the comparison, drop ratings and reviews, and only show yield comparisons when the data is regional or local enough to be trustworthy.

5. What I Learned

Design the catalog around the expert’s mental model

Crop consultants are experts who already have a process — they search by crop, they think in pests, they compare by rate per acre, they reach for label data and active ingredients. The job of the catalog wasn’t to teach them a new way to shop. It was to take the work they were already doing by hand, across a dozen sources, and put it in one place that respected how they think.

Conclusion

A good catalog for an expert is not just about discovery, it needs to help them decide faster and with more confidence. By starting with partner design sprints and grounding every component in interviews with working crop consultants, we built a catalog that earned a place in the consultant’s day — and, in the words of one of them, in the “conversation happening with a grower sitting right across the desk.”