Vibrant Planet – Land Tender

LAND TENDER

ROLE:
Director, Product Design / Principal Designer
Presence Product Group

SUMMARY:
Designed an intuitive digital product that brought natural resource management and wildfire prevention into the modern era.

Featured Article – How We Built Land Tender
Building Innovative Digital Products by Making Collaboration Appealing

 

Scope of Work:

When land management collaboratives shared wildfire prevention-related data and potential solutions through offline methods, conflicts arose because members did not have equal access to the information and treatment plans. Land Tender aimed to democratize this process by making sure everyone could participate in planning.

Not surprisingly, building a collaborative product required a collaborative design process, which I led with Kevin Rohling (Product Lead/Presence Product Group) and Maria Tran (Vibrant Planet/Product Advisor). Design was paramount because Land Tender needed to present an incredible amount of data to users which could easily overwhelm even the savviest of environmental planners. I started from scratch working with Vibrant Planet’s team (Chief Resilience Officer, CEO/Founder/Sensing and Geospatial Analysts/Ecologists/Etc.) to deeply understand all aspects of their product vision and develop a design strategy.

Land Tender’s design was based on an understanding of how users would be working together to prevent wildfires. I learned about the problems our users were trying to solve, their desires for the product design, and how group members would feel when using Land Tender. We iterated on discovery, prioritization of the minimum viable product, and Figma designs over multi-hour sessions.

Land Tender needed to present an extremely complex set of data on a map interface that users could both understand as a whole and as individual data points. I think the hardest part of this project was the ability to present up to 70+ layers on the map working in harmony with one another, so users could understand the dense amount of information in an easy, at-a-glance view. To accomplish this challenge, I designed Land Tender’s map legend to incorporated all the aspects of its land management data, such as natural features, human-created assets, fire danger, drought conditions, and economic potential and risk. It leveraged a complex color palette that indicated the specific aspect and whether that layer was turned on or off. A map legend may have seemed like a minor component compared to the overall map, but I recognized it was crucial to making the maps very concise and understandable for all users.

The product’s land treatment comparison tool became one of the features that most delighted users. When a user reviews a treatment plan in a competitive analysis, they can quickly see the aligned elements. This was unimaginable in the past. Collaborative members can now toggle through different scenarios, including those that prioritize biodiversity and those that prioritize community factors, and look at 10, 20, or 30 year previews of the results of each land treatment. In a simple chart, the comparison tool presented the crucial analysis that all collaborative members need to effectively work together to find solutions for wildfire and land management in their communities. This feature put all the members on equal footing when these groups discussed plans, and helped them avoid one of the major roadblocks to collaboration.

Land Tender has launched and has grown from a handful of team members to over 30 and has recently raised $17m in funding. Land Tender is now revolutionizing wildfire prevention through this collaborative product design.

• Branding
• data visualization
• Geospatial Design
• Product Design
• Product Marketing
• Product Strategy
• User Experience