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CarrierLink (iPhone & Android), an app for Truck Drivers was designed as part of FourKites’ initiative to help Truck Drivers - a key persona in the Supply Chain industry.
This project aims to help truck drivers have access to important communication around their shipments without having the need to call various carrier providers, warehouse managers or truck operators to learn about their assigned shipments, pick up and delivery details, warehouse facilities and optimized routes to manage their deliveries effectively.
Digitizing information to empower truck drivers with one touch access to load assignments, shipment details, facilities and amenities information, points of interests along truck routes and help them plan and optimize their long haul trips better.
The Challenge
The business stakeholders clearly highlighted the need to focus on truck drivers - a key persona, who are a reliable medium to help Fourkites with solving problems around real-time visibility. We also had an existing mobile app that was not designed for any specific persona or use-case. Our business realized that the adoption and usage of the as-is version of the product was poor and felt the need to revamp the app with a focus on solving truck driver’s pain points.
Truck drivers faced a tedious and lossy process for shipment assignment, pick up & delivery information, coordination with logistic providers & truck operators to handle varying warehouse processes and the documentation required to successfully complete a fleet assignment.
They often relied on outdated methods of updating their status ranging from paperwork to relying directly on vocal or text communication with various personas like Truck owners, Logistic providers, Gate Managers, Warehouse Managers or planners in order to complete an assignment.
My Role
I was the Lead Product Designer on this project working closely with our key Business Executives, 2 Product Managers, 1 Project Manager, 1 Engineering Manager, 5 Mobile Developers, Sales Team, Customer Support Team over the course of 6-8 weeks to design the app.
I worked to plan and execute the strategy for the design and research of the CarrierLink project.
This project is the backbone of a redesign of the Fourkites CarrierLink app and as part of this project, the following were some of my contributions:
- As-Is product audit using Information Architecture & User-Sentiment Analysis of As-Is app reviews
- Facilitated an Opportunity Canvas Workshop with all key stakeholders
- Conducted User Research along with Product Managers (in North America) using Observation and Contextual Enquiry methods
- Influenced Product Roadmap and Features based on User Research
- Provided Interaction Designs for the entire app
- Collaborate with Engineering team to quickly learn about feasibility and to deliver designs
- Created a design system to help the app scale and maintain a consistent experience for future iterations
- Post launch analytics by looking at Google Analytics and Pendo to identify improvements and measuring design impact
- Additionally, I worked on designs for key features of our flagship products Real-time visibility product and MVP version of Warehouse Management product that connects with CarrierLink and interfacing directly with gate managers, warehouse planners, logistic providers
Goals
- Provide complete and accurate assignment details - Â pick up/drop locations, weight, trailer type - dry/reefer, appointment details including contact information at the facility
- Empower truck drivers with information for route planning - includes, facility amenities, rest areas, gas stations, truck repairs & wash stops.
- Ease load documentation - document product condition, facility check-in/check-out details, proof of pick up & delivery
Discovery
- Conducted As-Is information architecture of the app to learn about the current pain points
- The existing app had complex set of features that spanned multiple personas
- The various features in the app were disconnected leading to either incomplete or fractured experience for users
Key learnings:
- User Research to learn about truck drivers and their pain points. Based on our business stakeholder’s inputs that Truck drivers are an important persona to understand and solve for, we wanted to understand a typical day at their work. So, we visited a few facilities in North America. The idea was to meet them in their context, observe and learn how they work. This also helped us to develop customer empathy, understand the truck driver’s touch points within a facility and how we could optimize time and cost for stakeholders involved.
Meeting with truck drivers across various facilities
Key learnings:
- Truck drivers do not have a reliable source of truth for appointment times, load details, requirements for driver gate-in & gate-out at the facilities and point of contact at the facility
- They needed better visibility on Facility amenities for them to plan their wait time at the facility like meeting other truckers, access to rest rooms, rest lounges and food/water access
- Truck drivers also run into back and forth communication overhead with carrier operators, truck owners or load planners to gather all information to successfully carry out a shipment pick-up or delivery since they don’t have all the information ahead of time
- They work with outdated methods and of documentation (printed copies, fax, emails) for proof of pickup and delivery
- Lack of standardized/streamlined processes across facilities causes lot of friction for Truck drivers in doing their job
- Summarize existing user reviews from app stores
- Users complained about usage of email for signup - which caused lot of confusion for truck drivers as they all had multiple emails (across different carrier or logistic providers)
- Too many notifications that disrupted drivers from using their mobile while driving
- Aggressive usage of data and battery, impacted other apps’ performance and slowed down the mobile
- Unintuitive to use
- Drivers felt that it was not solving their pain points and did not add any value to their work life
User Sentiment Score Chart
Key learnings:
Planning
- Facilitated Opportunity Canvas Workshop with business & product stakeholders. As part of the workshop, we settled on Truckers as our primary persona of interest. Finally, we also identified Business Metrics, User Metrics, Budget, Top Risks and Adoption strategy as part of this exercise.
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- Influenced the product roadmap by prioritizing customer pain points based on User research & planning sessions.
Designs
As with any product redesign, we went through multiple iterations of our redesign. The below information architecture references the state after the first improvement was made. This was an effort taken by me to assess and objectively surface areas of improvements for next iteration. Further iterations focused on streamlining the “Loads” section of the app as that seemed to have more complexity and lot of interest amongst our users. The design screens that you will see in the sections below will highlight the difference.
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Card Sorting to help identify feature groups and organize our content accordingly. We organized our content to provide maximum value for Truckers. For them, Loads, Route Planning and Places of interest were primary areas of concern and our redesign intended to address them directly. We also wanted to address some of the allied concerns of Truckers like socializing with peers, better work opportunities and their profile management to help improve their quality of work.
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High Fidelity Designs
Implementation Support
- Collaborated with the Engineering team to support their endeavor of exploring Flutter, a cross-platform app development framework
- This version of redesigns enabled us to adapt our design system to mobile form factor and provide a more consistent product experience across web and mobile
Launch & Impact
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