When BAT Agrar, a leading player in the German agricultural sector, needed a tool that could keep up with huge number of daily price requests, complex contracts, and field operations, we redesigned PreisAktuell from the ground up. The result: a scalable, intuitive, and high-performance platform trusted by farmers, field reps, traders and back-office agents alike.
CLIENTMY ROLEBAT Agrar & Co. KG
Product Designer, UX/UI
DURATIONTEAM12 months (2024-2025)
10-20 person team
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of BAT Agrar & Co. KG.The problem
When complexity outgrows the tools
As markets accelerated and margins tightened, BAT Agrar's existing system became a bottleneck instead of a support tool.
The platform struggled with slow performance during peak demand, fragmented workflows across pricing, contracts, and field operations, manual processes that confused even experienced users, high technical debt making changes costly and slow, and low trust in the system — a critical risk for daily decision-making.
This wasn't a usability issue alone. It was a systemic problem at the intersection of user workflows, technical constraints, and business risk.
Design challenge: Create a future-ready, scalable platform that could support BAT Agrar's operations through 2030 — while remaining usable, trustworthy, and efficient for expert users working under real constraints.
This was a 12-month, enterprise-level redesign. I came in as lead product designer — which in practice meant being the person who had to make sense of a complex domain fast, earn trust across a team of 10-20 people, and make design decisions stick in an environment where engineering constraints and business priorities were constantly in play.
In concrete terms: I translated product direction into experience before a single wireframe existed, shaping how strategy became something users could actually navigate. I pushed back on scope where complexity didn’t deliver meaningful user or business value, and used research to ground the conversation in evidence rather than preference.
I also mentored a junior designer, not just on craft, but on how to reason through tradeoffs and communicate design decisions to the people in the room who aren't thinking in flows and components.
The role demanded constant movement between levels of detail. Some weeks that meant working closely with the UX researcher defining what we needed to learn, prototyping, synthesizing findings, and translating insights into concrete design directions. Others, it meant sitting with engineering leads to understand what was technically feasible, then turning those constraints into design decisions the wider team could build from, without losing sight of the experience we were trying to create.
My role
Designing for expert users and real constraints
User-centered + system thinking
To make the system usable at scale, I focused on how decisions are actually made in the field.
Mapped workflows across all user roles to identify friction, dependencies, and edge cases
Identified where users needed speed, transparency, and control — not simplification at the cost of accuracy
Translated technical and business constraints into clear UX principles
Used rapid prototyping and testing with power users to validate assumptions early
Rather than hiding complexity, the design focused on removing unnecessary friction while preserving decision confidence.
A concrete example: the Edit Price interface.
Traders need to reference a lot of information to set a price accurately — product specifications, trading locations, pick up and delivery locations and live MATIF data to ensure prices are current and competitive. The temptation was to simplify the interface by surfacing less. But hiding critical information erodes the confidence traders need to make fast, accurate decisions.
Price History is a good example of this tradeoff. It's useful — especially for newer traders getting a feel for market trends — but seasoned traders, who make up the majority of this user group, already carry that context. Interviews confirmed it wasn't a primary reference during active pricing. So we kept Price History on the page but turned it into a collapsible section. There when you need it, invisible when you don't.
The result: a screen where critical signals — MATIF data and crucial product details — stay front and center, without removing anything of genuine value.
Edit Price (Preispflege) and Price History interface.System-level design for scalability
To support long-term growth and performance, I contributed to system-level design decisions:
Unified component library using Ant Design and Tamagui
Flexible architecture supporting role-based workflows
Interfaces optimized for low bandwidth and mobile-heavy environments
Consistent interaction patterns to reduce training and onboarding time
This ensured the platform could scale technically and operationally.
Results & impact
The redesigned platform quickly became a core operational system.
Within two weeks of launch
500,000+ price requests processed
→ A volume the previous system could not handle reliably
Within 60 days
1,000+ digital contracts completed
→ A major increase in digital adoption, one of BAT Agrar’s key KPIs
Platform-wide outcomes
Reduced cognitive load for operations and trading teams
Faster, more reliable workflows under peak seasonal demand
Increased trust in the system as a daily decision-making tool
The result: a scalable, user-centered system that improved operational efficiency and supported business growth.
Selected screens
Improved sales transparency and efficiency.
Previously
Farmers and sales reps relied on calls, in-person meetings, and hours of travel to request prices, sell crops, and arrange delivery. The digital experience wasn't much better — a long form requiring product details many farmers didn't have on hand, returning price cards they had to manually match to their own specifications.
The design challenge
The previous system treated each farm as a separate account—logical from a data perspective but cumbersome in practice—and the client would like to retain this structure. From a UX standpoint, I could see how punishing that would be — farmers with two or three farms logging in and out repeatedly throughout their day. I made the case to the PM, PO, and engineering leads to enable multi-farm management within a single account, working through technical feasibility and timeline together. It wasn't a given — it required cross-functional alignment and a clear argument for what the friction was costing farmers.
Scope discipline mattered just as much as structure. When users requested a price trend graph, I brought it into interviews rather than building it. Asked to explain why they'd use it during a price request, the reasoning didn't hold. Farmers need a decision in that moment, not a trend analysis. We cut it and kept the focus on speed and clarity.
The same logic shaped saved inputs. Because farmers check the same products daily, having to re-enter details each time created unnecessary work. One-tap price checks was an obvious call once the usage pattern was clear.
Design decisions
Restructured the price card around key selling signals to support farmer decisions and sales negotiations
Introduced real-time pricing visibility to support faster decision-making
Added crop favoriting and saved inputs to reduce repetitive tasks
Enabled price-tracking for selected products, reducing manual monitoring and helping farmers sell at optimal prices
Enabled seamless multi-farm management within a single account
Enabled remote transaction handling to minimise unnecessary travel
Unified pricing workflow to reduce complexity and simplify maintenance
Previously
Each trader had their own workflow, and the platform had accumulated 20 years of one-off features — creating confusion, inconsistency, and a maintenance burden that slowed everything down.
The design challenge
Twenty years of workarounds is hard to untangle — especially when users can't always distinguish between what they need and what they've adapted to. My job was to tell the difference.
Before proposing solutions, I talked to experts users to understand how pricing decisions are actually made — not just the steps, but the dependencies. What emerged reframed the problem: traders weren't struggling because the interface was cluttered. The system had never modelled how the work actually flows. You can't price a product without its specs already in the system. The fragmentation wasn't a design preference — it was a structural gap.
That insight gave me the confidence to consolidate. I proposed collapsing product details, price lists, trading hours, and freight costs into a single sequential flow that reflects how traders actually make their decisions. This change didn’t reduce their flexibility—it simply removed the elements that had been slowing them down.
The harder conversation was the dashboard. Every user groups wanted to "see everything." Rather than negotiating feature-by-feature, I ran interviews asking each group what they needed to orient themselves at the start of their day — helping them articulate priorities rather than preferences. When users attempted real tasks from the dashboard in testing, the requested extras proved unnecessary. The data made the argument I didn't have to.
Design decisions
Consolidated product, price lists, trading hours, and freight costs into a single workflow to reduce complexity and improve clarity
Standardized end-to-end pricing processes across all traders to support consistent decision-making
Streamlined platform structure to make maintenance easier and reduce one-off feature overhead
Digitized & simplified contract workflow for improved efficiency
Previously
Backoffice agents spent hours manually handling contracts — approving, tracking, and managing them through paperwork and phone calls. The process was slow, error-prone, and hard to scale.
The design challenge
Going fully digital was the obvious solution. But obvious solutions in enterprise contexts often ignore the reality of the people around them.
Two things shaped my approach. There was a business and legal requirement to maintain physical records. And many of BAT Agrar's customers — farmers — had been operating on paper-based processes for years. Eliminating that entirely wasn't just a technical change. It was asking people to abandon a workflow they trusted, on a timeline they didn't control.
So I treated paper as a constraint to design around, not a problem to eliminate. The primary workflow moved fully digital — faster approvals, a consolidated dashboard, clear status visibility. Paper contracts continued for record-keeping, running in parallel. Critically, this added no meaningful overhead — the digital workflow was fast enough that maintaining the paper trail didn't slow anyone down.
The result was a smoother rollout than a hard cutover would have allowed. Backoffice agents got the efficiency gains immediately. Farmers didn't feel like the ground had shifted. And the business stayed compliant without a separate records process bolted on top.
Design decisions
Designed a fully digital end-to-end contract workflow to reduce manual steps and speed approvals
Consolidated contracts into a single table and dashboard to provide a clear operational overview
Maintained paper contracts for records while shifting the primary workflow to a faster, digital system
Strengthened user administration and platform security
Previously
Admins had no simple way to manage users, making tasks inefficient and error-prone.
Design decisions
Designed a streamlined workflow to create, view, and manage users efficiently
Provided a clear overview of all users while maintaining platform security and confidentiality
Cross-functional collaboration
This project succeeded because design was embedded deeply in the product team.
I worked closely with:
Product managers
Engineering leads
Domain experts (pricing logic, contracts, field operations)
Customer-facing teams
A junior designer
A key part of my role was driving alignment — translating complex requirements and constraints into clear, shared design decisions that product, engineering, and business stakeholders could commit to.
“The collaboration was characterized by professionalism and openness right from the start. The team was able to understand complex processes very quickly and the workshops were consistently solution-oriented. The performance and support were remarkably good and communication was excellent at all times.”
-Felix Hirth, Head of Digital Sales (BAT Agrar)
Design leadership & mentorship
Although this wasn't a people-management role, I contributed design leadership by mentoring a junior designer on decision-making, tradeoffs, and stakeholder communication, leading weekly design reviews to raise craft quality, and shaping design processes for clarity, consistency, and cross-team visibility.
Let’s work together
Working on something complex? I'm currently open to product design roles in Berlin and remotely.