A Cotton Skills Benchmarking system ( http://agskills.com.au ) has been

developed and now needs to be ground-truthed with cotton growers. This report

provides feedback from 1.5-20 industry members about the usability, practicality

and usefulness of the system.

Across these industry members included:

. husband and wife owned manager with no staff

. growers and their staff

. corporate owner with manager and staff

Each of these different structures were able to provide different feedback to

allow for the development of a system suitable to all structures in the industry.

This feedback has been grouped into:

I. Establishment/Login Phase

2. Whole of Site Navigation

3. Language Used

4. Forms

5. Reporting

The recommendations made in this report regarding the above criteria, have been deemed through a process

of engaging with cotton growers. Overall there is very positive response to the

need and practicality of a system such as this, however a number of

recommendations to improve the system have been made. These centre around

three main themes;

I. the need for consistent and intuitive navigational systems throughout the

site to create a pleasurable and productive experience suitable to a range

of people with varying roles within cotton businesses and varying

capabilities

2. the need for the Forms to be able to be completed as quickly and

accurately as possible without compromising the data outputs

3. the need for useful, well presented and highly targeted reporting as the

primary benefit for encouraging grower take up of the system.

These three themes have stimulated a range of suggested improvements to the

site.