What a farmer needs to see: designing dashboards for people, not engineers

Connecting a farm, a pumping station, or a solar site produces a flood of data. The risk is that the flood lands on a screen. A dashboard full of gauges and charts looks impressive in a demo and exhausts the person who has to use it at six in the morning with muddy boots.

Communication is part of engineering a system people actually use. Here are the principles we apply.

Start with the person

Different people need different views of the same system:

A farmer or site operator wants to know what to do today.
A manager wants performance, costs, and trends.
A municipal official wants evidence that a service is running safely and within budget.
An auditor or regulator wants records.
An investor wants outcomes against plan.

One screen cannot serve all of them. Design views around roles, and let each person start where they live.

Answer three questions, in this order

Is everything OK? A clear, single status — healthy, needs attention, or action required.
What needs my attention? A short list of exceptions, sorted by importance.
What should I do? A concrete next step, ideally with one tap to act.

Everything else — charts, history, raw readings — sits one click deeper.

Progressive disclosure

Layer the information:

Overview: site or farm status at a glance
Zone or asset: this field, this pump, this battery
Detail: individual sensors, time series, settings
Raw data and export, for people who want it

A farmer should rarely need level 3; an engineer will live there. Neither should be forced to wade through the other's view.

Say it in plain language

Use units people use — millimetres of water, cubic metres, hectares, local currency — and keep them consistent.
Prefer sentences to codes. "Tank 2 is low and the pump is waiting for sunshine" beats "ALM-0417."
Provide the interface in the user's language. For Albanian farmers and operators, that means Albanian as well as English.
Avoid jargon unless the audience uses it.

Make alerts worth reading

Alert fatigue makes people ignore the one that matters.

Fewer, better alerts. Each should be actionable.
Say what happened, what the system already did, and what you can do.
Severity levels that mean something, with the highest reserved for real action.
Group related alarms — one cut cable should not produce fifty messages.

Explain what the automation did

Trust in automation grows when it can explain itself:

Irrigation skipped — Zone 3. Rain is forecast within six hours and soil moisture is above the refill point.

Action blocked by safety policy. Pump start refused: low water level in the source tank.

An unexplained "no" feels like a bug. A clear reason feels like a colleague.

Be honest about data quality

Always show when data was last updated. Mark old data as old.
Show a degraded sensor as degraded — don't present a stale or suspicious value as truth.
When a site is working offline, say so, and show that it is still protected and running locally.

Design for the field

Mobile first. Many users will look at a phone in a tractor cab or by a tank.
Readable in sunlight, with strong contrast. WCAG guidelines recommend at least 4.5:1 for normal text. Don't rely on color alone — add icons and words for people with color-vision differences.
Large touch targets for gloved or dirty hands.
Light on bandwidth, because rural connections are uneven.

Reports tell the story over time

Alongside live views, regular summaries — weekly, monthly, seasonal — show water used, energy generated, savings against a baseline, and notable events. Keep them short, comparable from period to period, and shareable with someone who never logs in.

Test with the real user

The best design review is an afternoon with a farmer. Watch what they look for first, what confuses them, and what they ignore. Then try the five-second test: show the screen for five seconds and ask what they understood. If the answer isn't "everything's fine" or "the north field needs water," the dashboard isn't finished.

Greecon's role is to make complex systems simple on the surface and powerful underneath.