Question
How to find new service opportunities for one strategic customer, while having the mindset to scale it to others?
Solution
A research-based user access and location management solution that is scalable enough to help multiple customers to have better control of their freight, internal people and their suppliers.
Collaborate with non-product areas, be curious on how to find new enhancements opportunities that user research can bring.
Learning
This project demonstrates my direct contributions to it as a UX Designer and UX Researcher. Currently I work as a Product Design Manager for ShipperGuide, and I'm overseeing implementation phases of the project from a design perspective.
A summary of the project
I led a research initiative with one of the ShipperGuide's strategic customers that allowed me to think if other customers had the same pain point. It ended up that they had and it was really relevant from both business and user perspective.
After sharing the research findings and opportunity with key stakeholders, I was able contribute with the design process to work on an assumption that could have impact on this user pain point as well as expanding ShipperGuide services offering and putting us on a better position compared to competitors.
My end-to-end design process followed continuous research, stakeholders management, meetings facilitation, prototyping, user testing, design handoff for engineering, as well as metrics to measure impact.
The final design solution is called User and Location Management and it was designed by me from scratch. It's started being used by ShipperGuide customers as it's being implemented by our squad.
Screenshot from the solution.
Interested in reading about my design process for this project?
Please continue reading for the full case study.
What is ShipperGuide?
ShipperGuide is a SaaS Transport Management System that helps U.S-based shippers manage and grow their business by offering end-to-end digital solution from the procurement process to analytics insights for their freight.
The first step in this project came from a UX Research initiative
I led a cross-functional research initiative which the goal was to:
Learn from one of our strategic enterprise operations customers called Scotts Miracle-Gro, hoping that if we understand their needs, then we may find opportunities to expand ShiperGuide to support other similar large enterprise operations.
The discovery process had the following structure:
Slide screenshot from a user report deck.
I can't share the full rearch report due to sensitive information.
The discovery report was presented to the Product Leadership. It got their attention and served as user evidence to contribute to the squads' roadmap for the Scotts Miracle-Gro customer.
The user access and location management user pain point being the top one priority for my squad
My squad was the responsible for working on one of the Scotts Miracle-Gro's key pain points brought by the discovery:
The customer need for user access and location management.
This is a real user quote I got from a customer named Sean Ryan - a Supervisor at Scotts Miracle-Gro:
"I have my role as Supervisor, but I'm not being able to delete or invite new users to the locations we have (Huntsville, for example)."
Bringing more people to the project
Even though this user access and location management finding from the discovery work for Scotts Miracle-Gro was valuable enough to ShipperGuide, my approach was to scale the discovery by talking to the Sales Team and see if other strategic customers had the same paint point as Scotts Miracle-Gro. And they did.
These tickets exemplify customers with the same pain point:
Tickets that Sales and Product collect user feedback
I was also able to have access to an estimated profitability opportunity with strategic customers that we could be missing for not to be working on the user access and location management customer pain point.
FUP = Freight Under Platform KPI.
My intention with the estimated profitability information was to draw stakeholders' attention to the opportunity.
Research with other strategic customers
As the Product Designer responsible for the end-to-end design process in my squad, I was also responsible for leading the research with other strategic customers.
Research method: 30 to 45 minutes Interview (Remote)
Tool: Notion and Google Meets
Recruitment: Email
Facilitator: Fernando Pereira
Participants: Product Manager
Interviewee personas: Shippers (Transportation and Supply Chain Manager and Logistic Supervisor)
Research findings
After my research, these are the highlights from talking to customers about the user access and location management pain point:
• There's a person in the company called a Supervisor who needs to manage their operation by different locations.
• But only the Supervisor has permission to edit the company's data.
• For them managing means to: see and create lanes, shipment tracking, shipment contracts, and RFPs, getting shipment quotes, creating shipments, and managing their carriers for all of their locations.
• The Supervisor needs to have access to all of their locations.
• Restrain other users' access by location.
• The Supervisor needs to have access to 1 or more Locations.
• The Supervisor needs to have analytics reports by different levels: whole company and other locations.
• Other roles in the company may need view-only access.
• There's an Inbound Logistics Manager persona that needs access to inbound shipments and orders.
• There's a Supplier persona that works in companies they work with, that needs access to open POs so orders can be fulfilled.
• The Supplier persona also needs to schedule shipments based on the readiness of their supplies to complete the orders and get paid.
• There's a Shipment Planner persona that needs access to all outbound orders, shipments and their statuses in terms of tracking and payments.
• There's a Finance persona that needs access to payments docs and reports.
• Supervisor, Inbound Logistic Manager, Supplier and Shipment Planner would benefit a lot from better shipmen tracking and info.
The problem statement
User level:
The research showed us that we had to address different personas. It was not just about giving users the ability to add more users and locations. The issue was that different user personas needed limited access to certain parts of their business based on organizational hierarchy.
Technology level:
After talking to engineering, we understood that ShipperGuide at the time was not developed to allow multiple roles from one company to be added, nor to add and manage locations.
Competitors level:
After a benchmark study, we saw that competitors like Emerge and Shipwell already had solutions to tackle this customer pain point.
The technology-level context
At this point, the project needed the backend structure to support the solution, and took Engineering Team a while to work to build this ground.
While engineering worked on the technology, my design process continued
I led several concept review meetings as well as design critique meetings to bring more people to the table, explain the opportunity, and get feedback on my design process. In those meetings, I had the participation of Product Managers and Engineering (from other squads included), Product Designers, Product Leadership and Sales.
Collaboration in Miro boards.
Visual Design explorations
I leveraged the Loadsmart Design System to design the solution in Figma.
Exploring multiple solutions for user access and location management.
Testing the design solutions with users
To ensure we had the optimal solution addressing users' pain points, I conducted usability tests to validate users' perceptions of the following main user flows: new user creation, new location creation, and viewing ShipperGuide sections in read-only mode.
Testing method: 60 minutes Moderated Usability Testing (Remote)
Tool: Figma Prototype mode and Google Meets
Recruitment: Email
Facilitator: Fernando Pereira
Participants: Product Manager
Interviewee: users from 6 strategic customers that I started the discovery with.
One of the main assumptions I wanted to validate was regarding the location switch. I aimed to make it as user-friendly as possible, so I tested multiple options.
Different solutions that were tested with users.
• Overall, the results were very positive. Everybody thought it was a clean and neat design, as well as a good product solution compared to most existent TMS platforms. There was no major block in the usability process and information was clear at all moments.
• Most positive feedback was about the Global location switch, but for my surprise, users shared that the options could also be positive for specific use cases. And that's a result of a customer need: Supervisors need to have access of all info of their location, but other roles as "standard" ones can have it contextually to the task they do.
• They highlighted the value on some additional features such as the delete and edit users from a location in case this person leaves the company of get another role, the simplicity of changing locations and how they can actually feel more secure with some roles not having edit permissions.
• One of the issues was that they couldn't intuitively understand what permissions certain role had. However, they feel like they could do everything smoothly.
Usability testing report.
The prioritization
There was an alignment between the squad and other stakeholders based on user priorities and business objectives that the solution should be delivered in different phases, due to its complexity and effort.
Phase 1: Supervisor persona's use cases - including switch location.
Phase 2: Standard persona's use cases - including view only and revamp of certain ShiperGuide sections.
Supervisor and Standar permissions in ShipperGuide.
Proposed solution - Phases 1 and 2
The proposed solution was based on the following principles:
• Efficiency: To simplify the old ways of moving - and managing entities.
• Integration: To provide unified unified solutions from different sources - and use cases.
• Data-oriented: To be assertive on being fast and powerful - to inform decisions.
Supervisor users can switch locations and see performance of all locations as well.
Location switch UI components.
Supervisor and other roles can see performance from different locations.
Supervisor users can switch locations and see ongoing shipments information.
Another example showing that supervisors users can switch locations from any part of the system.
User management UI components.
Location management UI components.
Performance metrics
The implementation is woking in progress but we can already see some results from it.
Switch location experience metrics - Month of April 2024.
Learnings so far
Switching locations seems to be a valuable feature for shippers, and the experience appears to be efficient based on the feedback we've received.
However, the possibility to add and manage locations is still missing. These use cases will be addressed in the next implementation phases.
Next steps - Implementation timeline
As I mentioned, this project is still being implemented. There will be more phases for its full implementation, with the next steps being the implementation of other roles in ShipperGuide and more location management capabilities.
The project is currently based on the following estimated timeline:
1. Being user-focused on a sales-oriented company is a real challenge. But it works in the end.
2. It took a significant effort to define the design scope of this work due to its complexity. Something I would definitely do differently is to break it into more milestones, not only for the solution but also for the user report findings. I sensed that stakeholders saw all the findings and wanted them all to be implemented "at once."
3. Collaborating with non-product teams such as Sales is something I want to practice more and more. It's great to see how much I could from this collaboration.
4. Sometimes we have to be resilient about decisions that can not be made by design.
5. Even though I was already working with shippers, I didn't know clearly how complex their company workflow is. Many times users have to wear many hats to do their job - and we need to help them with that.
