From Runners to Farmers: UX Problems Are Universal

A cross-industry perspective drawn from my work in fitness technology (Runcoach) and agriculture (Nutrien)

Introduction

On paper, designing a training app for runners and designing sales software for crop consultants have nothing in common. One audience is chasing personal records; the other is deciding how to fertilize a field. But after leading design in both worlds — first in fitness technology at Runcoach, then in agriculture at Nutrien — I came away convinced that the surface domain is a distraction. The hard problems were the same in both places. This is a short argument for why, and what it means for how we design.

1. The Same Opportunity

Both industries are sitting on an enormous, underused archive of data. Runcoach has years of training history for every athlete. Nutrien holds what is arguably the largest archive of agronomic data in the world. In both cases the opportunity wasn’t to collect more data — it was to turn the data already there into insight a person could act on. The job of design, in both places, was to stand between a mountain of data and a busy human and make it useful.

2. Building Trust

In both worlds, users are skeptical of being told what to do by software. Runners don’t trust a generic algorithm to understand their bodies. Crop consultants — experts whose advice lands more like a doctor’s prescription than a sales pitch — don’t trust an algorithm to second-guess their fields.

The solution looked surprisingly similar in both. At Runcoach, we earned trust by surfacing the human behind the software — bringing the real coach’s voice into onboarding, notifications, achievements, and email, so the product felt like a relationship instead of a formula.

At Nutrien, facing the exact same skepticism toward machine-learning recommendations, we gave the engine a humble, honest face named Max — a personality that admitted when it might be wrong and made it easy to push back. Different industry, identical insight: people don’t trust a model; they trust the interface and the humanity wrapped around it.

3. Taming Data Overload

Runners and crop consultants are both drowning in numbers. The temptation in both industries is to build a dashboard that shows everything. The better answer, in both, was subtraction.

At Runcoach, the calendar redesign replaced a wall of statistics with three simple views — today’s workout, the week, the month — so an athlete could glance and know what to do. At Nutrien, the employee dashboard followed the same instinct: instead of a control panel of every feature, it delivered the right message, in the right place, at the right time.

4. Creating Engagement

Neither product works if people don’t come back. And in both, engagement wasn’t a vanity metric — it was the mechanism that made the product smarter. Runcoach’s goal-and-progress loop kept athletes returning and gave us signal about what was working. Nutrien’s Max needed crop consultants to interact with its recommendations precisely so it could learn from their feedback. In both cases, designing for engagement was really designing the feedback loop that improved the underlying system.

5. The Universal Principles

Strip away the running shoes and the fertilizer and the same four problems remain in nearly every data-rich product: there’s an opportunity buried in the data, a need to build trust before anyone will act on it, a fight against data overload, and a constant push to create engagement. The tools and process I used to tackle them — field research, storytelling, rapid prototyping, testing and iterating — transferred intact from one industry to the other.

Conclusion

The most useful thing a designer can develop isn’t expertise in a single domain. It’s the ability to see the universal principle underneath the domain — to recognize that a runner who won’t trust an algorithm and a crop consultant who won’t trust an algorithm are, at bottom, the same design problem. Learn to solve the human problem, and you can walk into an industry you’ve never worked in and still know exactly where to begin.