GPS Livestock Tracking Platform: Discovery and Research That Shaped an Honest Viability Decision
3 min read · 704 words
Led user research and contributed to discovery and prototyping for a GPS livestock tracking platform integration, supporting a viability decision across five-country usability testing.
Every figure and quote in this case study was supplied by its author. None were generated.
The Challenge
Leader Products, a company in the livestock identification systems space, was partnering with Queclink to integrate Queclink's GPS Development Portal into its own online platform. The ambition was a single destination where farmers and livestock managers could purchase GPS tags, customise devices, manage subscriptions, and track animals in real time, all without leaving the Leader Products environment.
The integration raised hard product questions early. Single sign-on between two separate platforms, retail-level GPS subscriptions, and live animal tracking are each complex on their own. Combining them into one coherent customer experience, across multiple countries, with a user base that spans varying levels of digital literacy, added further layers of risk. The real business problem was not simply how to build this, but whether the proposed approach would actually work for customers, and whether the underlying cost and complexity could be justified.
Discovery and prototyping work needed to answer both questions, which meant getting in front of real users before any significant investment in development.
Key Decisions
- 01
Conducting Moderated Usability Testing Across Five Countries
- Considered
- Limiting research to a single market or relying on internal assumptions about how customers would use the platform.
- Chose
- Running moderated usability testing with customers across five countries.
- What it cost
- Coordinating research across multiple markets added time and logistical complexity, and it risked surfacing conflicting findings that were harder to synthesise into a single direction.
Extending the research across five countries meant the findings would reflect genuine variation in how customers across different contexts approached the workflows, rather than reflecting one market's habits. Where users struggled consistently regardless of location, that pointed to a structural problem in the design. Where feedback diverged, it surfaced where localisation or flexibility would be needed.
- 02
Validating Terminology Explicitly
- Considered
- Carrying the existing language from both platforms into the prototype and testing the workflows without isolating terminology as a variable.
- Chose
- Including terminology validation as a specific research objective within the usability testing.
- What it cost
- Adding a terminology layer to sessions that were already covering key workflows meant managing session scope carefully, and some depth on workflow questions had to be balanced against breadth.
GPS tracking platforms and livestock identification systems each carry their own vocabulary, and merging two platforms meant merging two lexicons. Testing terminology directly meant the team could make informed calls about which words would work across the customer base, rather than discovering language problems after the prototype had hardened.
- 03
Synthesising Findings Into Prioritised Recommendations
- Considered
- Presenting raw research findings and leaving product and roadmap decisions to the client team without a structured synthesis.
- Chose
- Translating findings into actionable recommendations that directly informed prototype improvements and contributed to product prioritisation and the development roadmap.
- What it cost
- Taking a position on prioritisation means owning a point of view that stakeholders may not share. It requires committing to a hierarchy of problems rather than presenting them all as equally important.
Research findings are only useful when they connect to decisions. Structuring the synthesis around priorities gave the cross-functional team and the client a clearer basis for the conversations they needed to have, including the harder ones about what the platform would need to be viable at all.
The Solution
The work covered discovery and prototyping for an integrated e-commerce and GPS tracking platform. This included cross-functional collaboration and client reviews, qualitative and quantitative user research across five countries, moderated usability testing on key workflows, terminology validation, and synthesis of findings into recommendations that fed directly into prototype development and roadmap planning.
The Results
The research gave the client a grounded picture of how customers across five countries actually interacted with the proposed workflows, what language worked, where the experience broke down, and what would need to be true for the platform to succeed at scale.
That picture informed a difficult but important decision: the client discontinued the project, citing questions about viability and costs.
This is worth naming clearly. Research that surfaces a viable product idea is valuable. Research that surfaces why a product idea is not viable, before significant development spend, is equally valuable. The discovery and usability work contributed to an evidence-based decision to stop, which is a legitimate and often undervalued outcome of rigorous early-stage research.