Designing an Operational Command System for Global Freight Logistics

VXL is a FreightTech pioneer and drayage leader, offers premium shipping experiences to many of the world’s best-known companies. VXL Trucking platform connects shippers with freight capacity across drayage, transload, and OTR

  • Project Type

    Client Work

  • Role

    UI/UX designer

  • Year

    2019 - 2020

  • Team

    1 Product manager, 1 ux designer, 3 engineers.

Our primary user is the Operational Specialist (OS). They are concerned with ensuring all shipments (i.e., marine containers) are outgated, delivered, returned to the port on time, and to collect all documents needed to pay truckers and bill shippers.

The Problem

  • High interaction costs

  • High labor costs

Research Questions

  • What causes our high interaction costs?

  • Where should we focus our efforts?

The Solution

  • Reduce time to complete key tasks

  • Reduce interaction costs

Methods

  • Semi-structured interviews

  • Workflow modeling exercises with users

What did we learn?

  • Users pogosticking between Orders and Loads.

  • Lots of low-level usability issues result in high interaction costs.

  • Actions buried under layers of navigation, menus, and screens.

Analysis

  • We need to reorganize VXL trucking to better align with our user’s core activities.

  • Shipments List, if designed to be more intentional, could really improve the user experience.

  • Bulk actions hold a big opportunity.

Usability Problems with the Old Design

  • Frequently jumping between Loads & Orders (now called Shipments).

  • Common tasks were laborious.

  • Table holds a lot of info and thus scrolls horizontally.

  • Filters locked in columns hides filtered values, creating confusion about why list is reduced.

  • No sense of the state of the shipment or what actions need to take place.

  • Unusable for any kind of track and trace activities.

  • Unusable for any appointment setting activities.

Goal

  • Reduce time to complete key tasks (Making appointments, Unblocking shipments, Track & trace)

  • Reduce pogosticking in Freight(Reduce usage of Loads, Increase usage of Shipments)

Results & Business Impact

Across AU and UK onboarding journeys, the redesign delivered measurable improvements in conversion, data quality, and operational efficiency.

Reduce time for key tasks

61%

Reduction in avoidable early-stage drop-offs

Reduce time for key tasks

49%

faster track and trace

Reduce pogosticking

64%

Engagement on Loads down

Reduce pogosticking

80%

Engagement on Shipments up

  • Stakeholder management is very important in the success of any project. Need to get better at that.

  • Have courage to trust the process and the work.

Things I learned