How might we streamline the workflow of a trucking shipper when booking quotes?

 

Portex Web Application

 

Portex is a venture capital backed startup focused on streamlining the freight procurement process. Insights from my user research with trucking shippers helped the team design and develop a simpler and more efficient workflow for a shipper’s quotation process.

PROJECT DURATION

3 Months

MY ROLE

UX Researcher

Data Scientist

Product Manager

PRODUCT TEAM

UX Researcher

UX Designer

Lead Engineer

CEO

METHODS & TOOLS

User Interviews

Usability Testing

NLP with Python

Design & testing with Figma

THE PROBLEM

The global freight procurement process is very ‘old school’ and manual, with vital data points for quotations living in static Excel or PDF documents that are lost in tons of email threads. In addition to that, booking confirmations occur via email and on the phone.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

The Portex product team and I set out to understand the current workflow of trucking shippers to identify their key pain points, goals and behaviours.

USER RESEARCH

Exploratory UX Research: 

  • I conducted semi-structured user interviews with 60+ shippers from SME businesses and larger enterprises across the US.

  • Interview Structure: 

    • Intro to Portex + team to build rapport

    • List of questions to understand user’s supply chain, day-to-day work processes, software used. I designed these questions with input from product team.

 

Content of quotations that live in emails, Excel and PDFs.

 

THEMATIC ANALYSIS

A thematic analysis of all the feedback from user interview sessions helped me understand the key themes in the shipper’s current workflow and all their pain-points in this flow. 

 
 

Shipper’s Pain-points

The thematic analysis of user feedback gave me insights on the biggest pain points in the shippers workflow:

  1. Manual data entry from Excel

  2. Multiple email threads to manage

  3. Manual data entry to Excel

  4. Inefficient comparison methods prone to human error

  5. Back and forth on email and phone calls, and inefficient document management

  6. Manual report creation

  7. No benchmarks for rate comparison

 
 

An average shipper carries out this inefficient and manual quotation process at least 40x times a week!

Shipper’s Workflow

 

From the user interviews I built a clearer picture of the shipper persona.

USING DATA SCIENCE

 I conducted NLP Analysis of Reviews of competitor tools to learn more about the pain points of users, and understand strengths and gaps of these tools.


Competitor Freight Procurement Tools

I shortlisted my analysis to the following competitor tools:

  1. Flexport

  2. Freightos

  3. Shipa Freight

  4. UPS

  5. SAP Ariba

  6. Emerge

Word Clouds

From the most frequent terms in word clouds, I could see:

  • Change is highlighted in multiple word clouds and is used in the context of users wanting to change shipment information.

  • Delay appears highlighting the importance of transit time.

  • Terms such as Expensive and Cost appear showing how users are looking for cost effective solutions.

  • Customs and associated charge is a major problem for users of Freightos.

  • Need appears in the word clouds showing room for additional features or tools in these solutions.

  • Contact information needs to be highlighted.

  • Approval workflowis an important feature that large organizations require.

Screenshot 2021-10-24 at 12.27.58.png
Screenshot 2021-10-24 at 12.28.14.png
 

DESIGN SOLUTIONS

Using my research findings, the product team designed & developed:

  • an Outlook Add-in that fits into the shippers existing workflow.

  • a Web Application that consolidates the shippers lane, quote rates, partner etc data in one dashboard.

  • These solutions have made the quoting process for shippers simpler and more efficient.

 

The problems in the shippers workflow were addressed in the following ways:

Problem 1 - Manual data entry from Excel

  • Templates: Shippers can create & save templates of frequented lanes on Portex Outlook Add-in. 

  • Contacts: Partners that shippers frequently do business with are stored on the Portex Outlook Add-in.

  • Automatic data capturing: Key data points e.g. lane rates, are automatically captured on the on the Portex Web App.

Problem 2 - Multiple email threads to manage

  • Consolidated Dashboard: Shippers can manage all quote requests to & from multiple partners on one dashboard on the Portex Web App.

Problem 3 - Inefficient comparison methods prone to human error

  • Comparison with Market Benchmarks: Real-time industry benchmarks are available on the Portex Web App for quick & accurate comparison.

Problem 4 - Back and forth on email and phone calls, and inefficient document management

  • Data storage in one place: Quotes can be sent out, booked and tracked all on the Portex Web App. 

Problem 5 - Manual report creation

  • Analytics & Reports: Automatic reports & analytics can be generated based on the data gathered on the Portex Web App.

Problem 6 - No benchmarking

  • Market Benchmark Data: Real-time industry benchmarks are available on the Portex Web App for quick & accurate comparison. 

Templates

Templates

Contacts

Contacts

Data Storage

Data Storage

Consolidated Dashboard

Consolidated Dashboard

Benchmarks

Benchmarks

Quote Comparison

Quote Comparison

Analytics & Insights

Analytics & Insights

CRITICAL REFLECTION

  • Conducted 60+ interviews to get a clearer picture of of the shipper’s workflow + their key pain-points.

  • Assumptions validated via user research.

  • Using data science complemented existing qualitative insights from user interviews.

  • Co-design process.

  • Rapid design prototypes + no-code solutions to test ideas.