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Comment by jonwinstanley | Hacker News Reader

Looks like a pretty bad user experience. I understand why you'd want that many screens, so all the data is visible, but they all look like they are built by different companies and with different types of screens and different styles of interface. Surely it must be hard to use?

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How many different screens does the average startup engineer use? github/lab, CI, CRM, analytics, metrics reports, ad portal, etc.

It's all specialized tools for specialized jobs. Not a farmer, but my understanding is tractor supplies torque for whatever tools are being pulled behind it or attached onto it.

Yeah, one glance at that setup to me and you can tell it's modular on purpose. Farms like these use their tractors as modular platforms that they build to fit their specific needs.

> How many different screens does the average startup engineer use? github/lab, CI, CRM, analytics, metrics reports, ad portal, etc.

It would be nice if these things all piped their data into a single consistent interface.

IIRC there are / have been attempts to create unified interfaces, since a lot of the services offer APIs as well, but in practice those unified interfaces will never offer all the functionality and information available - you just can't keep up or manage all of it.

The user experience is a lot better than it was a few years ago but you are correct, it's a lot of screens. There are two screens for the tractor itself. The lower screen above throttle, displays and controls tractor related stuff. The screen above does GPS guidance and mapping (automatic steering). There is a screen from the planter tool. That does mapping as well and probably does seed (population) rate control. The small blue screen I think is for the fertilizer controller (separate system and manufacturer again). I guess the screen all the way to the right is also for the planting tool. Maybe monitors the tanks that store the seed and other planter properties. I'm not familiar with the planter she is using.

They have integrated some things over the past few years (ISOBUS is the standard communication protocol for integrating). There is a lot more integration that could be done but it requires a lot of cooperation between companies. Also, the tractor is a multi-purpose tool and in this case is being used for a very specific job. So, many of the screens apply only for the job she is doing.

The idea is modularity. This is just for seed planting, but you can swap out screens for different tools attached to the back.

Also a lot of the screens can be attached to different machines, and or carried mobile which is useful.

This is the same situation in any number of industries where you can "mix & match" equipment. Even different products from the same company might have radically different UIs. Like anything else, it's not ideal, but you get used to it.

In my previous job, the same thing happened. In fact, one of our selling points was that we had a unified look and feel for all our equipment UI's. It made it easier for salespeople to demonstrate how buying our stuff could reduce training cost and error rates.

Ironically John Deere's experience was much better than many competitors, or at least it was for a very long time. Some competitors' cabs looked like the cockpit of a soviet era fighter jet, with everything controlled by a huge array of toggle switches.

ISOBUS was supposed to fix this by using the same monitor for multiple implements.

https://www.precisionfarmingdealer.com/articles/299-isobus-s...

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