Landstar Freight Matching
Client: Landstar
Role: Lead UX Researcher, Interaction Designer
Timeline: 4 months
Responsibilities:
Led user testing activities.
Collaborated with Landstar representatives to set user testing goals, communicate and schedule feedback sessions.
Scheduled, designed, moderated, and analyzed 10 user testing sessions
Organized session insights into backlog for product owners, created insights from feedback to present to stakeholders.
Owned interaction design for mobile and tablet touch points for the Capacity and Agent user experiences.
Presented changes each week to product owners.
Led conversations around design decisions, communication multiple options and the benefits and challenges of each option.
Feedback
When the Landstar decided that they wanted to extend their engagement with CapTech to continue user testing to inform future design and development of the consolidated portal, we immediately knew that we needed Maggie on our team. Maggie has received numerous compliments from our client on her professionalism and deliverables relating to the user research she conducted. Her intellectual curiosity combined with her enthusiasm and determination had made her a trusted and valued member on our team.
-Eileen Klaiklung, Interaction Designer
This was an extremely complex and detailed project and I think that Maggie handled it very well. She learned as much as she could in a very short amount of time and was extremely flexible when it came to stakeholder interviews. She should keep that drive with every project she works on because she was able to get up to speed very quickly. She was also able to compile all of her insights quickly and concisely to relay to the client very efficiently. She also was able to interpret wireframes into different breakpoints under tight deadlines as well as balancing other work she was doing. This clearly helped the project stay on the timeline.
-Nick Signet, User Interface Designer
OBJECTIVE
Landstar System, Inc. is a transportation and logistics company that provides services to countries in North America. They have 3 types of customers: Drivers that transport goods and materials, Agents that manage transportation logistics for their customers and Shippers with transportation needs. The majority of their business is to provide helpful tools and resources for Drivers and Agents, so that they can successfully run their independent businesses.
Since the company was formed in 1968, Landstar has collected decades of behavioral data and pricing trends from their customers. However, Landstar’s technical infrastructure and legacy applications have not been able to fully utilize the abundance of data available. At the same time, new competitors, such as Uber Freight and Convoy, have disrupted the transportation and logistic industry with their freight and price-matching capabilities. Landstar has noticed a downward trend in Driver retention as other transportation companies provide new digital offerings to Drivers.
In order to remain a viable competitor and retain their existing customers, Landstar wanted to produce and test conceptual designs for an enhanced, analytics-infused, freight-matching application—intended for both Drivers and Agents. The results from this design experiment would be used to inform a more formal design and development effort to produce a next-generation load board and transportation management system.
Landstar sought out to increase driver retention by providing a more effective means of connecting drivers to agents to capacity
Results
This project aligned 3 disparate workstreams into one to allow Drivers, Agents, and Capacity to work more efficiently and communicate more effectively. Informed by our competitive analysis and user testing results, our design team led business stakeholders through a relative priority exercise to develop a product backlog ranked by user impact and technical feasibility. In early 2020, we began the development of a consolidated portal with personalized freight-matching features.
Process
At the time I joined the project, a first draft of the desktop experience had been created. I created 3 separate user testing scripts catered to each pf our target users based on their needs and goals.
User Feedback Sessions
I evaluated the latest designs by organizing, moderating, and analyzing 16 user testing sessions. The wireframes were reviewed and evaluated by 4-6 representatives from our three target user groups (Drivers, Agents, and Capacity).
User Testing Insight
The slides below detail the observations I collected which were used to inform future updates.
User Testing Feature Backlog
The research revealed that the needs and expectations of the different users often conflicted with one another. This was also a long term multi-phase project. To organize potential features for discussion I organized the requested changes by user and potential phase of work, as well as any dependencies that may prevent the feature from being included.
Design of Mobile Experience
To collaborate with the Landstar representatives, I created interactive “whiteboards” using Invision. These boards allowed me to present updated wires to the team, and to document any notes or critique.
Mobile Wireframes
Much of the feedback received, especially from drivers, revolved around a need for more information about available about loads, and more entry fields when searching for jobs. Incorporating these requests into the mobile size screen required creativity in organization, layout, and usage of symbols.
Final Mobile Interface
With the completion of a digital freight marketplace competitive analysis and prototype testing with end users, Landstar reached back out to our team to design and implement a Consolidated Portal based on our findings. The team is currently working towards a beta deployment.
