Case Studies at Square V

The Brief

The Yield Gap Australia website was initially built in 2014, and did not match modern standards of design or interactivity. It was also difficult to interact with on a phone, which restricts usage by growers and agronomists who often use mobile devices due to the nature of their work.

Square V was asked to design and build a replacement website incorporating new datasets and integrating GRDC survey data. The new website should retain the strong science focus but "make it cool" and interactive, as well as be more usable in the paddock.

The Outcome

After reviewing the provided datasets, Square V ran an internal creative workshop, aimed at helping us figure out how we could "make it cool". Coming out of the workshop we had a number of ideas for design directions, interactivity concepts and also interesting features that would allow us to compare the data in different ways.

We created a wireframe prototype and workshopped this with the CSIRO team until everyone was happy with the planned concept. We then started building the new website. The new version of Yield Gap Australia is a fully client-side rendering application written in React + Redux with Python data processing integrated into the build process. The dataset structure is based on a multi-level (zoom) split of the map grid, using JSON files instead of a database (similar to Redis). Of particular note is the speed of the site considering the amount of data being rendered - we're very proud of the zippy end product that required some very clever engineering.

One of the cool new features we call "magic compare" (we're not great at naming things - see our company name!). This allows you to pick an attribute of a particular grid square like rainfall, and it will match your selected grid square with other squares that have the same rainfall and compare them on other factors like yield, yield gap and water-use efficiency along with practice behaviours. The intention behind this was to allow a grower to explore how other growers are doing with the same rainfall or yield, and whether looking into practice data could help explain some of the potential differences.

You can view the Yield Gap Australia v2 beta site here.

The rebuilt Yield Gap Australia website allows users to interact with and investigate the collected datasets in a cool and interesting way. It provides an easy-to-use and visually exciting interface that can be used by growers and agronomists on phones in the paddock as easily as by researchers and policymakers in the office. It brings together disparate datasets that are collected on different scales and areas, allowing comparison and investigation.

Yield Gap Australia v2 (beta)

Yield Gap Australia v2 (beta)

The Brief

The Outcome

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