CERES TAG needed getting a device from the box to the paddock to be something a farmer could do themselves, in minutes, without a support call.
CERES TAG builds smart, direct-to-satellite ear tags that track livestock location, movement and behaviour anywhere, with no base station and no cellular coverage required. The hardware was proven. The friction was everything that happened before the first data point: registering devices, assigning them to the right paddock, and getting a new farmer set up and confident.
Onboarding was the barrier between great hardware and a good first experience.
Every new farmer had to register a batch of tags, get them assigned to the right paddock, and confirm everything was reporting correctly. Handled manually or over the phone, it didn't scale, and the support load on the CERES TAG team grew with every sale. Tags also change hands, so the flow had to handle transfers between accounts, and tags already registered to someone else, without a phone call. And it had to work for people who are not sitting in an office.
Map the real onboarding journey first, then build the app around it.
We started with how farmers actually receive and deploy tags, not with screens. Add a whole box of devices at once, or add them one at a time, then confirm which location they belong to before anything is committed. That shaped a step-by-step flow which breaks registration into small, obvious tasks and gives every device a clear state: registered and reporting, running low on battery, or needing attention. Where a tag needs transferring, or is already registered to another account, the portal says what has happened and what to do about it in order, rather than dead-ending on an error. Registration and location assignment are wired straight into the CERES TAG platform, so what a farmer enters is live rather than re-keyed later.
A self-service portal that gets farmers to their first data point faster.
A farmer can now open the CERES Portal and finish onboarding on their own: adding devices, assigning them to a paddock, and confirming everything is reporting, without a support call. The tags send the data, but farmers see it through third-party livestock software, so the portal finishes by connecting a software provider. Without that step there is no reporting, so it is built into onboarding rather than left for later. It removes the manual bottleneck for the CERES TAG team and gives every new customer a confident first experience of the product, which is where long-term adoption is won or lost.
CERES GEN6 won a 2026 Good Design Award. We didn't design the tag. We designed and built the portal a farmer uses to set it up.
The CERES GEN6 tag was recognised in the Product category of the 2026 Australian Good Design Awards, designed by CERES TAG and Clandestine Design Group. Zero-touch activation means the tag switches itself on once it is on the animal.
The registration journey is where a farmer first meets the product, and that is the part we designed and built. A tag that activates on its own deserves a setup that feels just as simple. Read more on why we treat UX as part of the product.
