Transport — An approach to solve logistics
Product design process
Overview
Recent advancements in technology have given us a fair example of how with a line of few codes commuting from one place to another has been made so hassle free. With examples such as Uber and OlaCabs the advent of the taxi era caused a group of people think about providing a similar facility to logistic management in India. I was then approached by the group to work on their idea and design the product. They said:
“What we basically want is an…Uber for Trucks”.
The Challenge
The issue was not just to commute goods from one place to another. Transport was a two faceted product and we needed to create two independent personas to proceed ahead with building the product.The major issues involved:
- Creating a unified experience for a customer as well as a transporter
- Handling a group of people who might not be so well educated or acquainted with technological norms
- Bid handling system between customers and transporters
- Managing bids and orders for transporters and requesting and tracking them for customers
Functionality Draft
The functionality draft provides the overview of the features. They help think through the design decisions, to create and provide a useful user experience.
Persona development
We should always understand that getting hold of the exact character is never possible just by individual knowledge. However, we might get somewhat close by doing some market research i.e. asking actual people about their requirements. We actually went to potential users of the product and did short interviews with them.
A customer would be a busy man and does not have the time to arrange for all the amenities. He needs a service that can handle everything starting from picking up the goods, a proper tracking service and on top of if he does not have a proper idea of what everything is going to cost.
On the other hand transporters would have the main functionalities as fleet management and quote placing. They would want to optimize their whole process cost and thus would also require proper tracking of their trucks in transit and in idle state.
Product information architecture
For convenience sake only the app screens shall be shown from now on. Consecutive website screens shall be covered in another post.
Wire-frames
I prefer getting the rough ideas from my mind directly on to a paper. Pen and paper is my weapon of choice for making wire-frames. It is fast, convenient… and most importantly it is rough.
Product Screens — customer app
- Location:
The first section is for putting in the pickup and drop location. Clicking on every location takes the user to a different screen to choose the location from a map through a geotag. - Load details:
Proper information of the material to be transported. Options to prefill and an others category. The weight and the dimensions were required too. - Truck type:
Depending upon your load type there are different categories of truck that you can choose from. If you are unsure you can let the transporters decide. - Dates:
The pickup date with an option for flexibility. This is when you want the load to be picked up and shifted. - Comments
These include special instructions to transporters. May it be about Fragility or urgency. This is visible to the transporter once he gives a quote.
The tracking was done through their custom build tracking device that they were already using for logistic services via the parent company Maruti 3PL.
Product Screens — transporter app
On clicking on a available order the detailed view of the card opens up and the quote screen appears.
- Dates:
Selection of available dates if the dates are constricted or if there is a range from which he can select. - Truck Load type
Truck load that he is going to offer — full truck load or a distributed option of the whole load into multiple trucks. - Price
Quote price for the whole transport.
Then the customer to accept the offer if it is suitable. After that he would get a notification and that would be reflected in his Active orders section.
I hope this process has helped you figure out the procedure of designing an application end to end. By no means is this the perfect one. Although there is always a process from every project that you might find appropriate for your product.
This article was originally published on agnivasi.com
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Have a product you think we can work on? Reach out at si.agniva@gmail.com
