Jens Peter Hansen, Annette Hørning and Nicolai Fog Hansen Danish Agricultural Advisory Service
3 Landmand.dk – user’s perspective
Landmand.dk was launched in April 2005. It is designed with five tabbed pages (see fig. 2). There is a general start page that covers common farming aspects, and there are pages targeting dairy producers, swine producers and farmers with arable farming. These pages are business as usual – the site owner decides what to present.
The interesting part is the so-called My page (“Min side”). A user has to identify himself to login to this page.
If he holds a full membership of Danish Agriculture, the name of his local advisory centre will be shown – it is “LandboSyd” in fig. 2 – and a web part with logo and contact information for his centre will appear as seen in the upper right corner of fig. 2.
After login his options include:
1. selection of web parts, 2. customisation of web parts,
3. selection of navigation elements and customisation of these, 4. establishing single sign on (SSO) to other sites,
5. layout of page(s)
Figure 2 Screen dump of a My page from Landmand.dk
3.1 Selection of web parts
At present, the user has 59 different web parts to choose from and more are under development. Selecting a web part is done by marking desired ones with a checkmark in a pop-up window which presents all available possibilities ordered in different groups. It is possible to select several instances of the same web part. By customisation, same web parts will present different content.
3.2 Customisation of web parts
When on the user’s My page, most web parts can be customised using the appropriate tool panels. Examples of customisation include:
• Weather forecast: The selection of the location for the weather forecast by selecting a square on a map of Denmark. Each square covers 10x10 km. Choose the presentation of prognosis for precipitation, temperature, humidity and/or wind speed & direction.
• Daily news: Select between 45 sources of news organised in 11 groups. News from local advisory centres accounts for 21 sources at present. Choose the number of headlines per news source.
• Important dates: This web parts shows, in timely manner, information about deadlines to example for applications of subsidies; tax payments or changes in regulations / restrictions. To avoid clutter-ing the list, the user can state that he has organic plant production and then this information will be used to filter the important dates, thus he avoids information concerning dairy production or use of pesticides.
• Day calendar: The user enters his postal code, which the system uses to control which times are shown for sunrise and sunset. The user can choose to see only this or also a calendar for the current month showing the week numbers and working days.
3.3 Selection of navigation elements and customisation of these
The left column of Landmand.dk is designed to hold a number of web parts with links. This way, the user can build a My page with a left side navigation as it is common on web pages. When such a web part is selected, it might show 5-7 links. These links are a subset out of a total that might be as high as 35-40 links. The links that are presented to the user to start with, are determined by comparing user attributes with information about the links. If the user is not is happy with these, he can open a tool panel and select/deselect links from the complete collection on the specific web part.
3.4 Establishing single sign on (SSO) to other sites
At present, there is SSO to three external sites (LandbrugsInfo, PlanteInfo, Landmandsportalen) and a benchmarking application. The user selects a synchronisation web part in which he states his login credentials to the external site once. SPS remembers these credentials and takes care of an auto login to LandbrugsInfo.
There are also SSO to a number of sites for local advisory centre using the common technical platform.
3.5 Layout of page(s)
Using standard SPS drag-and-drop, the user can arrange the layout of his My page. There are small left and right zones; wide top and bottom zones and left middle and right middle zones. Zones adjust to fit the widest web part it is holding. This means that a user can make a really messy page, but with a bit of care, it is possible to layout pages fitting an 800x600 screen (avoiding the use of middle zones) and 1024 x 768 (using middle zones but not top/bottom zones).
4 User reception of Landmand.dk
4.1 Subjective response
Prior to the launch, the portal was presented in a beta version for the public in January 2005 at Agromek - the largest annual agricultural mechanization exhibition in Northern Europe. Here, it received the prize as the most important new product. The prize committee consisted solely of farmers.
Since then, we have presented landmand.dk at a number of meetings and conferences, where we in face-to-face situations have demonstrated and helped farmers getting started with Landmand.dk. The responses have been very positive and overwhelming with expressions like This made the trip to this meeting worth while or Wow, this is clever.
4.2 Facts
Looking beyond the subjective responses gives a more nuanced picture. At present, (March 2006) Landmand.
dk has 5.500 registered users. Of these, 2.900 are full members of Danish Agriculture. As it can be seen in fig.3, the growth rate number of users has increased a bit in 2006.
Figure 3. Registered users on Landmand.dk over time
On week-days, Landmand.dk has around 1 000 sessions with an increasing tendency, see fig. 4. The actual number of sessions is higher, as we at present count sessions by using the IP address, user name and a session time-out, the latter is 15 minutes. This means that users, who do not have an unique IP number and are not logged in, might not count as a session if somebody else with the same IP number already is on the site.
There has been a total of 1.648 different users logged on the site in the last 30 days3. 8 % of these were logged in “yesterday”; 19 % had been on the site in the within the last three days; 35 % within the last week and 55 % in the last fortnight.
3 20-02-2006 – 21-03-2006
Figure 4. Average sessions per day
In fig. 5, monthly page views for the homepage in general, My page and the cattle profile page are compared over time. The increase in page views in August was probably caused by a positive article in LandbrugsAvisen and the increase in January can be explained with the presence of Landmand.dk at the Agromek agricultural exhibition.
Figure 5. Page views over time for Landmand.dk
In a recent survey (Gfk, 2005), 1.106 farmers answered which sites they use in relation to farming. In table 2, the use of Landmand.dk is compared with the five most popular sites. It is worth noticing that a farmer can actually get key information from these sites on his My page or jump to the site with SSO.
Table 2. The farmers’ use of Landmand.dk compared to most used sites of a farming business relevance. GfK (2006)
www.landmand.dk 1 5 6 11 42 35
Landmandsportalen
www.landmandsportalen.dk 9 17 15 12 22 21
Danish Meteorological Institute
www.dmi.dk 9 17 14 18 19 21
Danish Crown
www.danishcrown.dk 1 13 10 13 34 29
Danish Agriculture
www.dansklandbrug.dk 3 10 15 18 27 26
Landbrugsavisen
www.landbrugsavisen.dk 4 9 10 16 35 25
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At Agromek 2006, we were present and helped farmers setting up their My page and showed them how to do it. Now, two months later, analyzing more than 50 of these users’ usage of their My page in the last month reveals that
• 65 % has not logged on again;
• 19 % has had three or more visits;
• 17 % has had only one or two visits;
The analysis also reveals that since Agromek, 40 % never logged on to Landmand.dk again, or at the most two times before they stopped using the site. An explanation to this low degree of returning users could be that the visitors at an agricultural exhibition include a much broader spectrum of farmers. For example farmers who are unaccustomed with the general use of a computer or farmers with a slow Internet connection (41 % according to table 1), who simply show interest at the exhibition, due to the fact that the service is free.
5 Discussion
Landmand.dk is developed to fulfil the needs expressed by users, and the users pay positive lip-service to the portal. Still, the use of the portal is not overwhelming. Several reasons contribute to this:
• Initially, some users had technical problems with their registration – this has since been solved.
Furthermore, users can now call a hotline, which will create their identity on Landmand.dk on the spot.
Another problem, which unfortunately did not come to our attention until after the launch, is a huge overhead of approx. 650 K java script and style sheet files, which the underlying Sharepoint platform has to load for a start. This has partly been solved by using http compression techniques but still the site is very slow if not using DSL. As it can be seen in table 1, only 43 out of 100 farmers have DSL, although this number is increasing very fast.
• Many farmers cannot figure out how to compose a My page. They might succeed getting the relevant web parts on their My page, but a number of these needs further customisation, i.e. pin-pointing the precise locality for the weather forecast, choosing the relevant news sources, and establishing a single sign on. Also, the arrangement of web parts on the page seems difficult for the farmers – the page ends up being a mess. If they cannot manage to create a useful My page, the idea with Landmand.dk is out of sight. Our response to these problems has been to make the web parts more intelligent e.g. letting the weather forecast web part choose locality based on the user's zip code, even if this might not be completely accurate. And just recently, we have launched a free service, where a farmer can fill out and submit an online form, which we then use to create his identity and a My page in accordance with the information he supplied us with.
• Does Landmand.dk offer the right content and services? The answer is yes according to our interaction with the users. It is also striking that it is possible to compose a My page, in a way that the user gets the cream of content from the popular sites shown in table 2.
• At present, the user has to key in his credentials to access his page – for security reasons it was decided not to offer a “Remember password" functionality. Users are complaining about this, and even if it is a small obstacle, it might bear the blame for the low usage of My page. It will be changed in the near future.
Landmand.dk has a growing number of services, but the major part of content on the site is still information.
As such, Landmand.dk is up against a general lack of preference among farmers for receiving information via the Internet or other electronic methods (Jensen et al., 2003; Howell & Habron, 2004). We expect to gradually
overcome this barrier, as we develop more services specifically related to the individual farm, such as data visualisation, simulation based on own data and elements of integrated farm management systems