TIMELINE
6 Weeks
MY ROLE
User Research, User Interviews, Journey mapping, Screen flows, Wireframing, UI Design & Interface design
TEAM
Freelance for
CLIENT
Rightways Air Logistics Pvt Ltd. India
Overview
Rightways Air Logistics is a trusted name in the arena of Express Air Logistics services. With 34 offices strategically located across India have created a niche by mastering the art of Delivery Management for business-to-business needs. They have a number of interfaces both for the staff and the customers to coordinate their efforts for delivery.
Rightways team wished to create a more cohesive design across all these platforms and merge them into a central database.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Create a cohesive design system that is accessible to teams across different locations and can be used by customers to accurately monitor and track their shipments.
Research Phase
EXPLORING RIGHTWAYS
Getting Acquainted
I started this project by learning about Rightways and understanding their current workflow. I had two initial rounds of meetings with the director of Finance Mayur Patil who was overlooking the project to get an in-depth understanding of the issues faced by their staff and the design requirements. Then I explored the current platforms myself based on the user tasks and mapped the existing user flow.
Evaluation Research
To cover the gaps and to assess further the usability issues and user behaviour I decided to accompany my initial exploration by conducting an evaluation research with different staff users. I recruited 2 admin users (one from the main branch and the other from the sub-branch), 1 employee who takes care of invoicing, and three on-ground staff dealing with pickups and consignments with the help of the project manager handling the redesigning of the Rightways portal.
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I conducted telephonic interviews with all 6 participants starting with understanding their role, responsibilities, and how they go about their daily workflow. I prepared a list of questions I wanted to do a deep dive in but brought them up as the participant reached that stage of the workflow to keep the flow of the conversation natural.
Related to on-ground staff tasks
1. How do you fill the Lorry receipts / does the customer keep the address slips ready or you have to do them
2. Do you know about your pickups a day in advance? or you get to know when you reach the office
3. What is your daily pickup routine like? do you just deal with pickups or midway also take care of consignments handling?
4. Do you know beforehand how much load is to be picked up to take appropriate vehicles?
5. Airway numbers are always informed on time
6. How do you update the details - all at once end of the day
7. What happens if the customer wants to send the packages to different locations
8. What happens when half the consignment is picked up
9. How do you deal with canceled consignments
10. Do the tasks on the current app represent your daily experience
11. What happens if you are assigned multiple pickups at the same time
For staff handling invoices
1. Do you follow a routine, say every 15 days or monthly
2. How do you know which consignments are not to be included in this invoice cycle
3. At the moment what process is followed to review a completed consignment before generating a final invoice
4. Are the consignments always reviewed on time before you need to share the invoice with the customer
5. What is the process like to find the correct rates for a customer while generating invoices
6. Do you have a list of requirements for each customer for their different clients? Does it change often
7. How is an invoice reviewed and can you make changes once the invoice is already generate
Admin related tasks
1. How do you assign tasks
2. How do you handle and prioritize pickups
3. How do you hand over employees details to sub-branch admins
4. What is the process of recruitment for employees
5. How are new customers onboarded and assigned a branch
6. What is the process of contracts and how are they managed
7. How are canceled consignments handled by a sub-branch
The research focussed on demystifying the regular tasks into smaller subtasks to better understand the issues being faced with the existing system and gain ideas for improvement.
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I organized my observations and categorized them using a customer journey map. This helped identify pain points and areas of improvement along the entire user journey. It also served as an idea-sharing platform between the team (me and the project manager) and the stakeholders (upper management). The process helped me identify clear touch-points for each task and prioritize the changes.
The user research uncovered various areas of opportunity, such as optimization of the pickup and consignment flows, managing the contracts, and automation of the invoice generation. But keeping the business goals and organizational capacity we decided to focus on some key areas which included simplifying steps to complete a task for on-ground staff and structure of the existing invoicing and contract system for the first release of the product. For the customer-facing app, we decided to first introduce managing and tracking of pickups and pushed the invoicing and contract management for the next release of the product.
Ideation
EXPLORING POSSIBILITIES
As mentioned above, I wanted to focus on simplifying the steps involved in the central day-to-day tasks to bring value and easy transition to the mobile system. By boiling down my research into these goals, it helped me make sure the design decisions are grounded in my user research.
Reducing Steps
Invoice flow: Invoice generation had multiple rounds of review and data collection points. Since this is a process that needs to be done for each customer every 15 days, the goal was to make the process more streamlined and reduce the need for revisions.
New user flow
Defining the structure
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
I also came up with a revised and simplified information architecture for both the staff (web and mobile) and the customer app.
For both the interface. design the goal was to design a clean interface. Having studied the original system and seeing the adaption issues we wanted to remove any unnecessary clutter from the mobile app and show the information that is relevant for the task assigned to the staff user.
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Along with the Information Architecture, I started wireframing the main components and testing with the Rightways team to select the best options.
Different card options for displaying the list of Lorry for the staff app
Deliverables
Mobile and Web App
After finalizing the visual language, I prototyped an interactive prototype to compile all the functions and flows for both the web and the mobile app for both the internal staff usage and the end customers.
