EverFreight

 

EverFreight applies the on-demand business model to a Logistics and Transportation Industry worth $1.4 Trillion. Their goal is to streamline and automate workflow tasks for Freight Shippers, Carriers, and Drivers.

 
 
 
 

My Role

Working alongside EverFreight’s founders and Product Manager, I lead the design of the iOS and Desktop MVP beginning in early 2016. I guided the team through User Discovery, Product Ideation, and Design Execution to project completion and design handoff in mid 2016.

User Discovery

I worked with the founding team to better understand and document the functioning bodies in the freight industry. During discovery phase it was also important to understand the overall mentality of the logistics and transportation industry to make appropriate comments and product decisions during ideation and execution.

Product Ideation & Scope

Understanding our users and overall market helped us ideate in product meetings by empathizing with users on all three ends of the product. As this was the MVP, I made sure business and user goals were always in harmony before making product design decisions.

Design Execution

I completed Journeys, Flows, Sketches, Wireframes, and Low-fi Prototypes to ensure the product was intuitive for all users before moving to Visual Design. I produced a simple Brand ID and UI for the interface once all UX testing was complete.

 

Our Challenge

As ratios of Truck Drivers to Shipments are low, the Logistics and Transportation Industry is scrambling to hire drivers and find new solutions to support the high demand of freight. EverFreight’s challenge is to innovate and create higher connectivity in an industry with a very traditional mentality and overall workflow. To ensure product success, strong user research was imperative in understanding the amount of technology and innovation widely accepted by the industry.

EverFreight’s mission is to connect and streamline the workflow of the Logistics and Transportation Industry.

 
 
 
 

Our Approach

The EverFreight MVP will centralize communication between Shippers, Carriers, and Drivers to ease the current cross-platform workflow and automate manual tasks to greatly reduce communication errors. This improvement to workflow will replace Freight Brokers and give full transparency to the supply and demand within the industry.

 
 
 
 

Discovery - Setting the Stage for Design

The discovery phase was a fast and focused effort to establish an understanding of business goals, competition in the market, and a deep analysis of each individual user within the shipping process. These discovery steps were vital in understanding our users and defining how the EverFreight product can address their pain points effectively. The following are the key insights that dictated the MVP:

 

Owner-Drivers Struggle With Brokers

Freight drivers that own their own trucks are often short changed by Brokers that operate in their own interest of commision.

 

Fleet-Drivers Need Direction

Freight drivers that operate as part of a fleet unit need constant transparency communication from the carrier-dispatcher to avoid dead-head miles between deliveries.

 

Carrier-Dispatchers Have Too Many Tools

Dispatchers that work as the guidance and planning for the fleet-drivers are overwhelmed with the amount of tools in their workflow, and have difficulty coordinating trucks when away from their desk.

 

Shippers Feel Unsupported and Want Reliability

Shippers want a timely delivery at a good price. They also want to build trust with their clients through their shipping etiquette–often deliveries that are late or damaged can affect the business relationships.

 
 
 

Meet EverFreight

EverFreight is a unified Logistics and Transportation tool that supports all members of the Shipping process to get freight delivered on time and with ease. Shippers post shipments, and Drivers pick them up – all the backend coordination and planning now automated to make life easy and focused on the job at hand.

 
 
 
 

Posting Shipments

Shippers enter important load details into a full estimate or quick quote. Once their shipment is posted, the best suited Driver near the pickup location is notified and routed to the pickup. Shippers can also save quotes for later, in case they want to shop around for a better quote.

 
 
 
 

Assigning Loads

Loads are assigned using a backend algorithm and that matches the load-truck requirements, and notifies the driver or carrier that is (or will be) closest to the pickup at it’s required time. Carriers are able to approve loads to their fleet drivers before notifications are sent.

 
 
 
 

The Pickup & Delivery

Once Drivers are notified for new pickups, they confirm intent for pickup before a notification is sent to the shipper. Once the driver is ready to pickup, they are guided to the pickup, and then to the delivery. Upon delivery drivers receive a signature from the receiving entity, and document an image of the BOL for confirmation and future reference.

 
 
 
 
 

UX PROCESS

How We Got There

Establishing Personas to Guide Thinking

To better understand the workflow of each user-type: Shipper, Carrier, and Driver user interviews were conducted to breakdown the shipment process and identify the pain-points in each user flow.

 
 
 
 

Lean Features to Complete Deliveries

Our focus was to select the appropriate features to solve user pain points and fulfill business goals. It was important for our team to avoid scope creep for the MVP – we did this by focusing on the minimum required tasks needed to result in a successful delivery.

 
 
 
 

In-Meeting Sketches to Low-Fi Prototypes

I whiteboarded concepts to guide ideation during initial product meetings.  Once concepts were approved, I produced and assembled those designs into low-fidelity InVision prototypes to determine usability.

 
 
 
 

After testing the Low-Fi prototype with key persona types, revisions were made in preparation for visual design. During this time we made sure to backlog features that we identified as too expensive or time consuming.

 
 
 
 

VISUAL DESIGN & BRANDING

Creating Trustworthy UI

To begin creating ideas for EverFreight’s branding, I researched existing branding patterns to understand common design traits across competitors in the freight industry. Since the EF product is considered technologically advanced for its industry, we decided on a badge design and typeface that both reflected simplicity and trust. Our main focus was to create an identity that existing shippers, drivers, and carriers could see as a trusted partner for their operations.

 
 
 
 

In-App color accents of bright blues and greens were chosen to accelerate the scanning and to allow users to identify certain activity states by color rather than text. Since freight coordination requires the user to consume heavy amounts of data, I chose colors, typeface elements, and hierarchy within card design elements to organize and guide the user through the information.

 
 
 
 

Concluding Thoughts

Interviews with each user-type allowed us to understand important and difficult areas in each user’s workflow. Understanding the cross-platform strain each user experienced on a daily basis, our design solutions were directed toward creating a simple and unified workflow. By focusing closely on the minimum requirements to streamline the shipping process, we were able to implement a very clear set of features for the MVP, and postpone larger features for post-financing efforts. Moving forward, testing the MVP with a small sized freight company and a small shipper will allow us to better understand and make adjustments to the platform.