Ancera Post-Harvest Mobile App

Client
Ancera (Biotech Startup)

Role
Lead UX Designer (solo)

Duration
~1 year

Platform
Mobile (iOS/Android)

Goal
Build a mobile app to deliver actionable food safety insights from USDA and FDA data to food production and allied companies.

The Challenge

Ancera had low UX maturity and no existing UX design culture. I was hired as a UX Designer but expected to function as a UI executor. Without a formal creative team or research process, I had to advocate for UX practices, introduce design systems, and guide design direction across four products simultaneously.

The challenges at hand:

  • Stakeholder decisions were idea-first, not user-first.

  • UX strategy was often dismissed — especially coming from me, a woman of color (though at least when my white male counterpart repeated my advice, we were able to get a bit further).

  • The initial product vision lacked clarity and didn’t meet actual user needs.

The Process

Since Ancera had low design maturity, I introduced a riff on the design-thinking process that I call the C.L.E.A.R. method—ideal for early-stage startups that feel they don’t have the time or resources for full UX research and strategy processes while having stakeholder needs already defined.

This method is structured as follows:

Context — Understand the problem, system, and stakeholders
Lens — Build a shared perspective using user goals, empathy maps, and insights
Explore — Sketch, wireframe, propose multiple paths
Align — Get early feedback and internal buy-in
Refine — Iterate based on real-world signals

Context

The original product vision was vague: provide insights to help food production professionals make better decisions using public microbial performance data. But there was little alignment between this vision and actual user behavior, needs, or language.

After delivering a first round of wireframes based on leadership’s assumptions, I confirmed what I suspected: the features being prioritized didn’t solve real problems. The product was being designed around internal assumptions, not user pain points.

To shift the team’s perspective, I pushed to define a clearer product direction grounded in how professionals in the agriculture industry actually navigate food safety, risk, and compliance decisions.

Lens

When an experienced R&D engineer transitioned into the Product Manager role, we aligned around a more grounded, user-centered lens.

I introduced lightweight UX tools:

  • Whiteboard workshops to identify key user questions and feature assumptions

  • Personas to clarify user types: allied customers, facility managers, QA teams

  • Problem reframing exercises: not “what can we build?” but “what decisions are users trying to make?”

Together, we rewrote the product vision to focus on:

“Empowering food manufacturers and their allied partners with practical microbial performance insights that support targeted intervention strategies.”

This alignment unlocked internal momentum for a more human-centered approach.

Explore

With a clearer product vision and user lens, I began translating complex scientific and regulatory content into simplified wireframes and flows:

  • Developed IA (Information Architecture) based on persona tasks and priorities

  • Created multiple iterations of low-fidelity wireframes

  • Facilitated working sessions with the PM to validate design direction before sharing with stakeholders

Due to the complexity of Ancera’s offerings, I collaborated with a visual designer to split responsibilities. I handled:

  • UX strategy

  • Flow architecture

  • Interaction design rationale

They executed:

  • Visual design direction

  • UI polish

This setup allowed us to maintain speed while preserving usability and clarity.

Align

Since formal usability testing was deprioritized, I advocated for internal demos with stakeholders. The Product Manager and I presented annotated wireframes, walking through the user flows and reasoning.

Through these demos, we gathered feedback that led to major pivots:

  • Dashboard redesign: Moved USDA/FDA alerts and industry highlights to the top of the dashboard. Moved product promotions to their own tab.

  • Facility comparison: Created tools to compare microbial performance between facilities and track peer group trends.

  • Advanced search: Added filtering by serotype in the discovery tool so users could drill down into microbial data that matched their intervention strategies.

These changes directly addressed real user goals: reduce recall risk, benchmark performance, and identify facility issues proactively.

Refine

We incorporated final feedback into a revised MVP, which launched in December 2022 with the following features:

📲 MVP Features

  • Onboarding flow for new users

  • Dashboard with industry alerts, customer performance, and personalized filters

  • Discovery tool with customizable search filters (protein, process type, serotype)

  • Facility profiles with performance timelines, percentile comparisons, and culture results

  • Watchlist & My Facilities to track high-priority accounts

  • Notifications for new datasets, recalls, and status changes

  • Product page with all offerings listed in a separate section

Outcomes

MVP launch was well-received by internal stakeholders and users

  1. Additional usability demos post-launch helped guide onboarding

  2. Created a user guide to support adoption

  3. Resulted in 100% user retention at the time of onboarding

My Role

Advocated for UX in a low-maturity design environment

  1. Led end-to-end UX strategy and wireframe development

  2. Introduced and implemented the CLEAR framework

  3. Translated complex biotech knowledge into accessible flows

  4. Facilitated cross-functional collaboration between PMs, engineers, and visual designers

  5. Set foundational design patterns for scalable interface decisions

Tools & Skills

  • Figma

  • Information Architecture

  • Wireframing

  • UX Strategy

  • Cross-functional Alignment

  • Biotech Data Visualization

  • Low-Fidelity Prototyping

  • Stakeholder Communication

  • Agile Environments

Reflection

Working at Ancera taught me how to lead design clarity in complex, ambiguous environments. It also reinforced my belief that a clear framework (like CLEAR) can not only bring order to chaos — it can help product teams see through the noise and design with purpose.

Want to know how I introduce clarity to chaotic cultures?

Discover my signature C.L.E.A.R. framework — built for real-world UX in startups and low-maturity orgs.

You can read more about it here.