Freight Planning
Redesigning how fleet managers assign team drivers to freight through a collaborative, cross-functional design process.
Our client a Fortune 500 transporation and logistics company a people-first company founded on innovation, disruption, and service, working towards its mission of creating the most efficient transportation network in North America.
This project was created to enable freight managers to assign a team of drivers to freight to handle team freight requirements.
As part of this project, we implemented a design thinking process to enable cross-functional teams to solve the problem
User Research, Research Synthesis, Design Thinking Workshop facilitation, Ideation Session, Design prioritization, Wireframing, Visual Design, Prototyping and Usability testing
June 2022 - October 2022
Experience Led Cross functional Solutioning
A leading fortune 500 Logistics and Transportation Company
(North America)
The operations platform of the TMS system is currently used by fleet managers to plan and execute freight, they also use the system to manage their fleet of drivers.
Certain freight requires a team of drivers to execute. The current system does not support assigning multiple drivers to a single freight at the same time.
Several accounts which executed team freight did not onboard our modern system because of the above limitation. This led to poor adoption rates and in order to improve product adoption we decided to solve this problem
This case study represents a meticulous implementation of our cross-functional solutioning design thinking approach and an opportunity to see how it is practically applied. I believe in taking an approach to design that is deeply rooted in both theory and practice, and we can see those worlds collide here.
During the project planning phase I kickstarted the research activities for this project
My research encompassed -
• Conducted contextual enquiry where we observed users at their work setting
• Informal interview post enquiry sessions to probe further based on prepared set of questions
Fig: After conducting 12 contextual inquiries and analyzing the gathered data, we were able to identify the key pain points, observations, tribal knowledge etc.
Using “How Might We” Questions to Ideate on the Right Problems
Fig: At end of discovery as a cross-functional team we all came together and identified the top things we wanted to focus during the ideation
Rather than taking a pain point as is, and directly drawing out solutions, we decided to present the pain points and observations as a series of how might we questions to first focus on.
Post completion of the discovery and research synthesis phase as a team we have identified the key how might we statement we wanted to ideate as part of the ideation session which I facilitated
What I did during ideation -
• Each participant of the cross-functional team was given time is required to sketch ideas based on the HMW statements
• As a facilitator I setup round table workshop sessions to allow each participant to present their design
• Each participant took notes while the other participants presented their ideas
Fig: Miro board where we captured all the ideas from cross-functional team participants
This workshop is to determine what ideas we want to incorporate into our design and ultimately our solution. It will determine which ideas we as a team truly feel are valuable and feasible to solve our problem. We facilitated multiple workshops to prioritize the ideas we identified during ideation.
What we did during prioritization -
• As a facilitator I setup round table workshop sessions with a cross-functional team and facilitated discussion for each idea to decide the priority of the idea
• As a facilitator created a priority matrix and organized ideas based on the priority identified by cross-functional teams
Fig: Miro board used during the Prioritization workshop where I prioritized all the ideas
We created a design plan to organize the prioritized ideas and started designing mocks for prototyping
What I did during design -
• Created a design plan to organize the priority ideas
• Designed wireframes and presented them back to cross-functional team and stakeholders for approval
• Created clickable prototype for usability testing
Score
Post usability testing we iterated my design based on feedback and conducted final design review with cross-functional teams
As part of delivery -
• Created screen flows for all edge cases, validation and errors
• Conducted a content review to align with the client platform standards
• Included documentation for every screen capturing its behaviour and design components
• Shared XD prototype to the dev team for downstream consumption
• Conducted UX retro session with product team
Once the final designs are approved we created usability testing scripts and prototypes for several different workflows and facilitated moderated usability testing sessions with users.
We iterated my designs based on the feedback from the users and shared my findings through a usability report with the product team.
Fig: Adobe XD prototype with documentation for every screen for development team
Fig: Team retro conducted with the cross-functional team to improve on the process
Post-development the feature will be deployed in production. As part of closing the funnel, we implemented a post-implementation workshop with the product users to understand user sentiments and gather first-hand feedback
What we did during the validation phase -
• Conducted a post-implementation workshop to gather user feedback on the feature
• View Hotjar and google analytics recording and gather insights
• Validate metrics against the feature’s outcome hypothesis
I tested the product at various stages of the project.
1. Early Research
We conducted user interviews and contextual enquiries at the early stages of the project. The insights from the research enabled to help the product to better define the problems. This was instrumental in the success of the problem definition phase.
2. Proactive Communication in Key
When conducting a cross-functional team workshop proactive planning with effective communication is key to success. We utilized to plan well ahead to keep the cross-functional participants informed on the different activities of the workshop.
3. Retro in Invaluable
After every activity, we conducted a UX team retro as well as a product team retro. Through these retro we were able to identify what went well and what needs improvement. We utilized these reposes to improve the process as well as the team.
Fig: Using hotjar to view recordings of user interaction with the application to understand frustrations and other insights
The cross-functional team utilized my research insights during the project epic definition sessions to better define the problem
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