Connected Freight

Three month project to redesign application, reset how design engaged with product team, and deliver future-proof designs.

The need for Freight Visibility

Say you want to ship something expensive or fragile like flowers or pharmaceuticals. You want to know that your shipment is being handled properly while in transit.

Connected Freight is a solution where you attach sensors to the crates and can monitor temperature, tilt, shock, and location while your goods are in a truck, plane, or ship.

You'll be notified if your shipment is damaged or stolen and get the necessary documentation for insurance.

Project Setup

Connected Freight had come from early ideation to being tested with customers and had reached a point where the UI was blocking further customer adoption. There was already a single designer on the project. This person reported into the product team.
I engaged with two designers and a researcher on a three-month project to redesign the app with the understanding that all designs would have to be future proof i.e. all designs should be possible to implement short term and also point to a long term solution.
To get started and to reset the way design worked with the product team, i worked with the head of the product team on how we would engage. Below are a few examples from my proposal which became what we followed with few modifications.

Start with Research

We were lucky enough to be able to follow a shipment from start to its first transfer very early in the project. This became the first part of our foundational research.


Personas

Through more interviews and more research we developed four personas.


Carla
SHIPPING CUSTOMER

Has my shipment arrived on time in good condition?

If it didn’t, what problem prevented it, and how will the 3PL ensure that doesn’t happen again?

Dax
SHIPPING AGENT

Who has the info I need (driver, etc)?

Is the data I’m looking at accurate?

What other data is available and where can I get it?

Will
WAREHOUSE WORKER

Is the information I’m provisioning correct?

Is the tag I’m using good to go (battery is good, etc)?

What to do, how to do it, and that I did it right.

Don
TRUCK DRIVER

Did an exception Occur?

Will an exception occur?

If it does, how should I address it?

Sketching with the team

The design team met daily to sketch and review designs. I would sketch ideas and solutions and help the team understand the subject matter, the goals, and constraints.


Design System based Direction

We have a solid design system at Honeywell and this made it easy to reimangine the app and quickly get from the original design to a new direction.


Before

After

Delivery across Devices

One of the topics we needed to get right was the notification story. We needed to make sure to have a consistent messaging across text message, email, web app, and phone app.


Email

Text message

Web app

Design for Current and Future Features

Since we only had three months for this redesign we needed to set up the team with designs that would allow quick implementation and testing yet allow for adding more features later without breaking the design.

For email templates we decided to start with text only, then adding more and more color, and finally adding charts.