Overview
Ever wonder how shipments on trucks are managed? How do trucking companies figure out which truck is going to be used by which driver and which shipment it’s going to pick up?
How do you optimize tens of thousands of equipment and a hundred moving pieces to make sure the supply chain keeps trucking along? (pun intended). Well, that’s what this project looks at. A shipment management experience that allows trucking managers to effectively manage their drivers, equipment and shipments.
0%
0th
Role
Lead UX Designer
Team
2 designers; 1 researcher
Project Duration
Sector
Transportation and logistics
Stakeholders
A note on our users
The goal for this project was to enable planning managers to plan their drivers day. They have a complicated job where they’re charting out which driver will pick up which shipment and from which location.
They’re juggling a whole bunch of priorities while doing this- they’ve got to make sure that :
every shipment for the day gets picked up on time
they create an optimal route so trucks aren’t driving empty for too long
that drivers individual preferences for routes and trucks are respected
that drivers have work to do the entire day so they get paid
![993 [Converted]-01.png](https://framerusercontent.com/images/H0O4QXfRVUEuHYXgTP86LrIDrE.png?scale-down-to=1024)
User Goals
We started out with some high level goals from the business and over the course of our research, translated business objectives into user goals. Here’s a brief snapshot of how we defined those goals.
Keep Drivers Happy
Xiaolin likes to end her day near downtown Kirkland, Jessa needs to end at 5:00 today, Swati doesn’t like going to the Target in Stoughton, Anderson was on terrible loads last week, he needs something easier today.
Enable planning
Melissa, a senior manager starts at 6 am and needs to get all 200 of her drivers at least 1 load before they start at 8:00 am. She’s also got 60 Amazon loads that need to be out before 8:30 am
Provide Visibility
20 loads slipped through the cracks last week and had to be pushed to the next week. Did we not plan efficiently or do we need more drivers?
Virtual Whiteboarding
Once we identified a core working team, the project kicked off on a virtual whiteboard on Miro to keep everybody aligned. UX owned the process while working closely with our dev, product and business counterparts.
The rest of this case study is going to be screenshots from this board walking you through the details.
You’ll see a little thumbnail on the bottom right corner of each image that follows telling you where on the Miro board I’m taking screenshots from. (And yes, I wish there was an easier way to share this content.)
Discovery
About 4 weeks long, detailed research was conducted to understand user pain points and long term vision for the project.
Format: Contextual Inquiries
Participants: UX Designers + Researchers
Time: 8 one hour long sessions with end users
Process: We shadowed 8 users through their day-to-day jobs to understand the current system and how its used to plan loads.
Outcome: A detailed understanding of the current tools, processes and mental models of the user.
Legacy Systems
The answer? A hodge-podge of systems built in the 1980s and 1990s that they’re constantly jumping around in. We spent a great deal of time understanding these systems because that was our starting point- how does this job get done currently and how do we take that, re-imagine the process and build something that doesn’t take a 6 week training course to get started on.
Visioning with the leadership team
Once we’d understood things at ground level, we decided to switch to a 10,000 foot view. We got together with senior leadership to figure out what the future of this space looked like. What is the future or the role and the process?
That took the format of a workshop talking through ideas centered around these 6 key focus areas.
Mapping Ideas
Our synthesis was ongoing process through the rest of the process - endless impromptu calls, endless amounts of “this is so confusing and I don’t understand what is happening” which finally led to some great insights and ideas. It culminated with ideas grouped together across a few key themes.
Collaborative Ideation
We convinced our counterparts (product, business and tech) to get together, sketch some ideas and put them on our board. We then met in a workshop format to talk through the ideas and vote on what worked best.
Building the Information Architecture
The product is centered around three key screens- a list of shipments that needed to be covered, a list of drivers that are working and a planning screen to help match those together.
Medium Fidelity
We took the ideas from our ideation sessions and plugged them into medium fidelity mocks so we could have more conversations around the details and the data. This is where things start getting serious and we start layering in some discussions around technical and timeline feasibility.
Integrating with the design system
Solution
List of Shipments
Driver Recommendations
Confirming the plan
Planning Cart- Accessible across the entire platform
Driver View- List of drivers the manager needs to plan for
Shipment recommendations
Usability Testing
Format: Moderated usability tests
Participants: 8 end users
Process: 4 Task based usability tests with increasing complexity, Miro Board with screens to get initial feedback.
Mistakes were made, lessons were learned
0%
0th