How We Redesigned FBN To Obtain Massive, Sustainable Growth and Millions in Profit

Building FBN’s first design library and moving from a paid membership to an open platform was a major transition that resulted in significant quantifiable success. It allowed more than 87,000 farmers to increase their profit potential.

Role: Senior Product Design Manager

AT A GLANCE:

growth in membership

500%

in created revenue

$Millions

increase in self signups

85%

year-over-year Increase
in online signups

30%

increase in product
page visits

43%

cart attachment conversion within a year

50%

increase in 8-Week member retention

25%

The new landing page features modular components and marketing content.

The Challenge

Farmers Business Network, an ag-tech and eCommerce company, wanted to change its platform from a paid membership to an open platform for verified farmers to expand its user base and offer a high-value, personalized experience. After interviewing users to understand farmers’ onboarding pain points and content needs, we realized that fragmented user onboarding, a lack of content personalization, and inefficient page creation processes slowed user acquisition and delayed marketing initiatives. FBN needed a CMS that would empower quick content creation and a user-friendly onboarding process to minimize the need for sales calls.

The former legacy page required engineering resources to make changes, which wasn't ideal. In addition, a $700 annual membership to FBN meant millions in lost opportunity.

The Fix

Alongside a team of 10+ designers I recruited and trained, we developed FBN’s first comprehensive design library to unify the UX across the platform. We redesigned the login systems and account creation steps to better reflect farmers' needs and introduced a new Content Management System (CMS), which allowed staff to quickly create and update content, significantly reducing the dependency on engineering resources. Leveraging all the above implementations set a consistent pace for the incremental release of growth experiments. We measured these against historical metrics in order to easily evaluate their success and refine our strategies in real time.

Our integration of design libraries, code libraries, documentation, and analytics for system implementation.

We used Zeroheight as a design system manager to help retain consistency across the code and product.

A weekly review of the latest implementation, comparing performance against control to validate hypotheses.

Pat Duncanson, a Minnesota farmer who has been a member of FBN for about five years, was one of the many who praised the redesign and expansion. "Part of their approach to quality data was to attract quantity of data. The bigger pool to work from means the poor data almost weeds itself out now.”

The Results

Quantifiable results were apparent within days of launch: a 6X increase in user memberships, an increase in self sign-ups by 85%, an increase of product page visits by 43%, and an increase in 8-week member retention to 25%. The platform generated millions of dollars in revenue, converted 50% of initial signups into successful memberships over a year, and created a 30% year-over-year increase in signups. Moreover, our new modular platform enabled marketing teams to create new pages in minutes—a stark contrast to the previous dependency on engineering that delayed content updates for days.