Tiered Pricing
Spot Manager
In the dynamic realm of logistics, swift adaptation to market fluctuations is vital. I led a pivotal project to overhaul our company's rate management system, addressing a key deficiency in our quote rating process. Our objective was to replace the existing manual methods with a more efficient, automated approach, particularly in response to the surge in demand from specific locations and key customers.
PS: While this portfolio provides an insight into about a quarter of the entire solution, it's just a part of the larger narrative. For those interested in a more comprehensive understanding of our project, its challenges, and the solutions we developed, I invite you to reach out for the full story.
Spot Manager
Spot Manager is a powerful tool that allows us to manage transportation expenses dynamically throughout the year, not just during peak seasons. Whether it's a sudden change in demand due to market shifts or specific high-demand periods like Black Friday and Christmas, Spot Manager enables us to set controls for both future and immediate needs.
For instance, when customers require additional transportation capacity—whether outlined in contracts or as a result of unexpected market demands—Spot Manager lets us adjust rates accordingly. It allows us to charge above or below marketplace rates, depending on real-time calculations of factors like current market conditions, fuel costs, truck availability, and customer relationships.
By continuously adjusting to these variables, Spot Manager ensures we meet our customers' needs efficiently while optimizing profitability in any market situation
My Role
As the Lead UX Designer, my responsibility spanned the entire lifecycle of this logistics app project. Collaborating closely with the product team and a UX researcher, I focused on ensuring that the design was not only user-friendly but also leveraged the latest in automation and machine learning.
My approach emphasized simplicity and clean design, aiming to create a seamless and intuitive user experience.
Throughout the project, I steered the design process, balancing technical functionality with aesthetic appeal. My role involved extensive research, iterative design, and continuous collaboration to align the product's evolution with our strategic objectives.
Methodologies Used
- Stakeholder Interview
- Contextual Inquiries: Super User
- Contextual Inquiries: Everyday User
Design Strategy and Stakeholder Engagement
- Stakeholder Interviews: I used stakeholder interviews to integrate my project management experience with my UX design skills. This approach helped ensure that our design strategy was well-aligned with business goals.
- Insights from Stakeholders: From these interviews, I learned about the challenges related to third-party app dependency. This understanding was crucial for planning our product's capabilities.
- Addressing Dependencies: I focused on how we could reduce our reliance on external products, identifying the key information needed to build a more self-sufficient system.
- Prioritizing the Roadmap: In planning our development schedule, I emphasized 'must-have' features, ensuring we stayed focused on essential functionality rather than 'nice-to-haves.'
- Aligning UX and Business Goals: By conducting regular sessions, I ensured our UX efforts were continuously aligned with our business objectives, aiming to create a solution that delivers value to both users and the business.
Persona and Journey Map
During the previous fiscal year, I developed detailed personas and journey maps for this user base, providing a solid foundation for understanding their needs and behaviors. A recurring theme was the time-sensitive nature of their tasks—everything they did needed to be completed quickly and efficiently. Additionally, users demonstrated a deep sense of pride in their work, valuing accuracy and precision as key elements of their roles. These insights played a pivotal role in shaping our design solutions, ensuring we aligned with their urgency while honoring their commitment to excellence.
Contextual Inquiries - Super User
During my contextual inquiries with super users, several key pain points emerged:
- Users currently rely on an Excel spreadsheet, known as the Spot Opportunities Tracker, to manually track wins and losses. This process is time-consuming and prone to errors.
- The existing system does not allow for the storage of information related to losses, limiting the ability to analyze past opportunities.
- While information about capacity is available in 360 Loads, its presentation does not effectively support spot pricing decisions.
Contextual Inquiries - Everyday User
Through my contextual inquiries with everyday users, I identified several key pain points:
- Users relied heavily on manual record-keeping for spot pricing bids, maintaining an Excel sheet to track their work. Much of their workflow was tied to third-party software, and when it came to bidding, they had to submit bids on loads one by one. In some cases, they were required to bid on thousands of lanes, making this process incredibly time-consuming and prone to inefficiencies.
- Completing spot pricing often requires navigating through multiple systems, leading to delays and frustration.
User Research Insights
- User Interviews for In-Depth Understanding: I conducted interviews with users from specific business units to gain insights into their needs and understand how the tiered pricing structure affected their daily operations.
- Workflow Research: My research revealed a significant dependency on third-party apps, primarily due to the absence of suitable in-house software solutions.
- Identifying Information Gaps: I discovered that users frequently relied on inaccurate data from various sources, leading them to manually calculate prices for each load—an error-prone process.
- Spotting Inefficiencies in Data Input: Observations highlighted the cumbersome nature of manual data entry into bidding platforms, which not only slowed operations but also increased the risk of mistakes.
Design Workshop and Development Leadership
In leading the Design Thinking Workshop, I orchestrated a collaborative session with users, product owners, and business analysts to ideate on the quote volume multiplier software. The goal was to achieve stakeholder alignment on both needs and desired outcomes.
Through this collaborative effort, I merged diverse ideas to create a comprehensive design that fosters innovative solutions and informs a strategic roadmap for immediate and future enhancements.
I encountered challenges with the existing design system, specifically the absence of a crucial table component. To address this, I initiated the development of a new tree table design that met project requirements while enhancing the overall user experience.
Incorporating tailored error handling mechanisms into the table component was another key focus, emphasizing user experience, accessibility compliance, and efficient error resolution.
I also faced an unexpected challenge when the design system's error handling failed to meet accessibility standards. I took the lead in redesigning these features to ensure compliance with necessary guidelines.
Throughout the project, I demonstrated adaptability and creative problem-solving, particularly in responding to unforeseen obstacles. This flexibility ensured the delivery of a solution that aligned with our workshop's roadmap.
Insights and Recommendations from the Design Thinking Workshop
From the Design Thinking Workshop, we gained valuable insights that shaped our approach moving forward. We uncovered user needs, desires, and objectives by setting aside assumptions and focusing on the current workflow. This process allowed us to prioritize features and refine potential solutions into a single design that delivers the greatest benefit to both the customer and the business.
Based on these insights, I recommend implementing the following enhancements:
- A dashboard that enables tracking of trailers and loads while providing easy access to reports for better visibility.
- Utilization of automation and machine learning to suggest potential bids, improving efficiency in the bidding process.
- Integration of third-party software within the Spot 360 box to streamline operations.
- Management of the bid board from a single location, simplifying workflows for users.
These recommendations aim to create a more user-centered design that aligns with our workshop insights and enhances overall functionality.
Aligning User Needs with Business Stakeholder Roadmap
With this solution, we gained a comprehensive understanding of what our users wanted. However, it was crucial to ensure that our findings aligned with the business stakeholder roadmap. This necessitated scaling down the solution to focus on delivering the most important features that would provide the greatest impact.
Landing Page
The first solution we introduced in Spot Manager is the ability for users to land on a personalized page where they can immediately access and interact with their quote multiplier based on their unique preferences. Spot Manager caters to a diverse user base, each with different priorities and areas of focus. Some users work exclusively with specific customers, while others focus on particular locations or lanes. To accommodate these varying needs, we provided flexible viewing options where users can select between customer-specific, location-specific, or lane-specific views of their quote multiplier data.
Redesigning the Table: A Core Challenge
One of the major design challenges we faced was the table structure itself. The current table within the existing design system didn’t meet our requirements, as it lacked the sub-column headings and failed to comply with WCAG accessibility standards. This required a complete overhaul of the table, both in terms of its structure and accessibility compliance.
To solve this, I led the redesign of the table component, ensuring it could support sub-column headings and meet the necessary WCAG guidelines. This involved navigating the design system process to secure approval for a new table structure, which now benefits not only Spot Manager but all products across the company using the table component. By tackling this challenge, we were able to deliver a solution that meets both the business and accessibility needs of our users.
This solution underscores our commitment to designing with user needs and accessibility at the forefront, while also ensuring scalability and consistency across our design systems.
Mass Create
Currently, users have to create these quotes one by one. They select a specific location and create adjustments for one load at a time. This process can be extremely time-consuming, especially when users are dealing with thousands of lanes at once.
To streamline this workflow, we provided a solution that allows users to create quotes for multiple locations and make adjustments across multiple ranges simultaneously. Instead of having to work on a single quote at a time, users can now apply positive or negative percentage adjustments in bulk, drastically reducing the time spent on manual entry.
Additionally, users still retain the flexibility to edit a single quote band if necessary. This means that while they can now handle bulk adjustments efficiently, they also have the control to make precise changes on an individual level when required. This balance between mass updates and granular control ensures that the system is both efficient and adaptable to the varying needs of our user base.
Create : Error Prevention
One of our key objectives was to reduce errors in the system as much as possible. To achieve this, we introduced a feature that pre-fills some of the information when users are creating these band ranges. This way, there can't be any gaps within the band range, no negative inputs, and certain selections are always required.
We also made sure to auto-populate critical information, such as minimum and maximum volumes, and implemented proper error validations to prevent any incorrect entries. By pre-filling and validating this data, we minimize the chances of users making mistakes during the process.
In addition, users have the ability to select manual quotes. For situations where they are unsure of the exact range they want, they can choose an adjustment option for manual quotes. Once a quote band is triggered in the automation, the system sends an email notification. This allows users to quickly access the system and make any necessary adjustments based on the current scenario.
Mass Edit
One of the key features we introduced was the mass edit capability, which was a particularly challenging problem to solve. In some cases, users only needed to update one specific piece of information for hundreds of lanes or customers. We wanted to avoid forcing them to make individual edits for each entry, as they had been doing previously.
One of the major challenges we encountered was error validation within editable tables. Our company’s existing error validation system wasn’t accessible, as error messages lived behind an icon requiring a hover action, making it difficult for users to identify issues quickly. To solve this, I worked with the design system team to develop a new solution for the table. This required extensive research into industry standards, but ultimately I had to design a custom solution from scratch since no established guidelines were available.
Additionally, I collaborated with the development team, researching PrimeNG components to ensure the solution could be implemented without causing further technical issues. While the final design met the accessibility and engineering requirements, I wasn’t fully satisfied with the color contrast, as it was constrained by the J.B. Hunt design system. However, we were able to deliver a working solution that streamlined mass editing and met key requirements for the product.
Usability Testing
We conducted comprehensive usability testing with a diverse group of users, and the results were highly encouraging. All participants completed the tasks, and we achieved an impressive usability SUS score of 87. What made this even more remarkable was that the majority of these users had never interacted with any of J.B. Hunt’s products before, meaning they were unfamiliar with our design patterns, tables, and interactions.
Despite this, users were able to easily navigate the system, complete all assigned tasks, and expressed positive feedback about the overall experience. The intuitive design resonated with them, and their enthusiasm for the product was clear—a strong validation of our approach to user-centered design.
Establishing Benchmarking for Future Success
Following the launch of this product, we implemented a benchmarking process for future use. So far, we have conducted three benchmarking experiences, and this section outlines the first one. Collaborating closely with the product team was essential to promote this initiative, as no other product within our company had adopted benchmarking before. This effort was aimed at setting a new path forward for our products.
Benchmarking involves evaluating a product’s user experience through quantitative data. The metrics collected during this process are compared to previous product benchmarks (i.e., before and after redesign) or against industry averages.
To gather valuable insights, our User Experience Research (UXR) team sent out a survey to Spot Manager users. This survey focused on overall product characteristics, including usability, enjoyment, and task-specific usability.
User experience questionnaire
Attractiveness: Spot Manager scored 0.93, indicating a generally positive reception from users in terms of visual appeal and overall impression.
Pragmatic Quality: The highest score was in this category, with a 1.15 rating. This reflects that users found the product practical and efficient for task-related use, showing satisfaction with the usability aspects.
Hedonic Quality: Spot Manager received a neutral score of 0.6 here, indicating that while users found it functional, the emotional and enjoyment factors were not as strong compared to the pragmatic benefits.
These results show that while Spot Manager performs well in delivering its core functions, there’s room for improvement in making the system more enjoyable and emotionally engaging for users. This data will help drive future design iterations to balance both functional and experiential qualities.
Single ease questionnaire
The Single Ease Question (SEQ) metric gave us valuable insights into how users rated the ease of completing specific tasks. As shown in the graph, most tasks were rated between easy and neutral, though some tasks received lower scores, indicating potential areas for improvement. This data, combined with insights gathered during focus group discussions, provides a clearer picture of where we can refine workflows and address user pain points to improve overall usability.
Google Tag Manager
We paired benchmarking with Google Tag Manager to gain deeper insights into the product, marking it as the first initiative of its kind within my company. Google Tag Manager is a powerful tool that allows us to track specific events occurring on a page. It can monitor a variety of interactions, including:
- Toast message occurrences and text
- User IDs
- Buttons pressed – task completion rates
- Time on task
- Scroll depth
By utilizing Google Tag Manager, we are able to track quantitative user behavior, providing us with critical information about:
- How the system is used
- Existing gaps in functionality
- If an issue is widespread
- Surprising product usage habits
- How users interact with each step of a task
From 1/1/23 to 2/23/23, our findings revealed that users were only completing the entire Mass Update workflow about 50% of the time. This insight was surprising—why were users repeatedly searching within the Mass Update (sometimes 5 or more times in a row) only to abandon the workflow?
This behavioral data provided valuable context to the survey results regarding the Mass Update feature, helping us formulate additional questions for the follow-up focus group.
Focus Group
We held a focus group to understand why the Mass Update feature received unexpectedly low ratings. While the data showed dissatisfaction, the real issue wasn’t the feature itself but unmet expectations in related areas. Users had needs we hadn’t yet addressed, which impacted their feedback.
Key Insights
- Challenges with Spot Overview: Most issues stemmed from Spot Overview, not Mass Update.
- Training Gap: Lack of tutorials for new users was identified as a major gap.
- Efficiency Enhancements: Features like Bill To Account filtering and multiselect for Mileage Bands will improve workflow.
- Mileage Bands in Roadmap: Concerns about Mileage Bands are already being addressed in this year’s plan.
This focus group helped us realign our solutions with user expectations.
