Create a New Freight Claim in the Final Mile Application
Automation of manually generated orders into the new Final Mile application experience.
Project Overview
Delivering Results.
This project is a great example of my ability to conduct and leverage user research to inform strategic design decisions.
Problem
Unigroup Logistics wanted to digitalize its manual freight claim process for users in the Final Mile Application. With increasing substitute products and customer experience driving competitive advantage, an optimized, automated experience was overdue. I set out to transform this complex, paper-heavy task into a simplified, cohesive digital experience.
Solution
We ran design sprints based on the design thinking methodology, which includes 5 key phases: emphasize, define, ideate, and test. We successfully created and released a fully functional solution, that enabled users to increase their productivity and reduce costs related to the repetitive, time-consuming manual freight claim creation process.
My Role
As the Sr. User Experience Designer, I was responsible for leading and working on all aspects of the visual, interaction, and experience design. I collaborated with cross-functional teams and leveraged users, peer, and stakeholder feedback to validate iterative designs up until final hand-off to developers for implementation.
The Team
The Final Mile team was comprised as follows:
Four Software Developers
One Product Analyst
One Product Owner
One Senior User Designer
The Approach
Empathy
Understanding the Users
My primary focus was to develop a new claims management feature into the system that would enable planners, service providers, and customers alike to have full transparency into the status of any given claim. Before getting started, I knew I needed to fully understand the current Claims process and the user's requirements to produce a streamlined experience.
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First, I conducted end-to-end benchmark studies with subject matter experts to understand the use cases, processes, and performance metrics for freight claims.
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Next, I facilitated a series of research sessions to fully understand the representative audience's current claims process. This allowed participants to walk through each step of their process with a strong focus on their goals, required information, key stakeholders, and success criteria at each step.
The findings from the research conducted were used to inform the design concepts that followed.
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Defining the Problem
Identifying & Solving User Pain
Next, I used the findings from the research conducted to highlight the problem space through a user-centric lens and began conceptualizing solutions. Using whiteboarding and lo-fidelity mockups, I collaborated with the product team, engineers, and UX peers to evaluate concepts, content structure, and features proposed in the initial versions.
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Ideate
Brain Games & Wireframes
To socialize the new experience and gain additional feedback, I presented the initial ideas during our team's bi-weekly standup. The solutions were in fact consistent with and supportive of the user, business, and technical requirements, so I built a high-fidelity prototype using Sketch and InVision to support testing for remote usability testing.
Prototyping
Evaluating Alternatives
Lastly, I translated the sketches and wireframes into a hi-fidelity prototype for remote and in-person usability testing. The solution was designed to give distinct user types: Service Providers, Central Planners, and Customers, more visibility into the status of a given claim.
Testing
Satisfaction Guaranteed
The user's found the experience, including its usability, visual design, and interactions to be "straight forward" and "user-friendly," meeting their expectations and mental models.
Final Deliverable
The design guidelines for this final version included:
Incorporate Unigroup’s Momentum visual brand guidelines
Enable users to add additional notes and attachments to the freight orders
The final version was developed through iterative sketching and user research.
Results/Conclusions
Work in Progress
In this case, major gain creators for this solution included:
Quick Filter buttons that enabled users to filter claims based on the status
Clickable dashboard feature to help users visualize and drill into critical items i.e. Claims Reported, Claims Investigated, and Claims Settled
Notifications for transparency among key players in the experience
User-centric suggestions for improvement were primarily focused on information architecture and additional data they would like to see at a detail level.