Oiling the Engine — Designing for Convoy’s Internal Customers
A flat tire or sputtering engine on the road is never pleasant to deal with when commuting. When the commute involves driving a 40-ton big rig, the problem proportionally increases in scale. Drivers trust Convoy to help tackle such challenges, and our internal operations teams, in turn, trust our tools and data to quickly understand situations like this to act accordingly. Designing the right experience to develop and build this relationship is critical in keeping truckers rolling on the road and supporting a happy and productive internal team.
While designers are familiar with ‘getting to know your users’, it is an uncommon luxury to be in such close daily proximity with them. Convoy has amazing operations teams that are not only experts in their daily tasks but are also passionate about creatively solving problems. Partnership with operations, oftentimes in the form of just hanging out and shadowing on a regular cadence, is tremendously important. While doing this there are a few tenets that are key to designing great internal experiences:
Build trust and empathy
The product we are designing is something people are required to use every day. There are set operational processes and business logic in place. We are also designing for multiple stakeholders that don’t always share the same objectives. Inclusiveness early in any design ideation through shared experiences and collaborative creation means designs can be validated before pixel pushing even begins. This has been invaluable especially in situations where a design modifies an existing process, which can be disruptive and jarring if not built in close collaboration with stakeholders.
Question and innovate (deliberately)
Although standard operating procedures are important for scaling, there are key opportunities when standards can be re-evaluated. Sometimes, asking the simple question of ‘why do you do x in y way?’ garners incredibly insightful, self-reflective feedback that can guide a design in the product or an improvement in the operational process. This can hold especially true in a hypergrowth environment when an operational decision made sense for a team of 20 people but became unsustainable a year later when teams have grown exponentially.
Dive really deep
One of the challenges of freight is to understand and balance the perspectives of the driver, the shipper, and the warehouse. Building an experience to support this balance requires diving deep to understand the problem below the surface. Take advantage of the openness and knowledge within the teams to drill into details.
View the right landscape
Keeping in mind the breadth of impact a problem may have is important for the design of a scalable system where information has a huge surface area. When multiple teams are looking at the same data through different lenses, understanding where and when to show the right data and actions is vital. There is a tradeoff between presenting everything versus hiding too much away — and when decisions need to be made quickly, designing a balance is critical. For example, we designed a guided experience to help surface ideal scheduling times when a truck should pick up and deliver a shipment. The visual cues, data points, and personal knowledge that someone typically uses to mentally calculate scheduling transformed into a simpler experience where a time slot could be selected quicker and with more confidence — a powerful tool for a process that can be extremely time-sensitive.
Be smart about data
Convoy is highly data-driven — metrics are crucial to analyzing and optimizing operations. With the help of this data, we can determine how a design feature contributes to increased efficiency and successful service levels. Working closely with data science helps to responsibly use quantitative and observational aspects of our metrics to inform our designs and avoid typical traps such as bias.
Be highly attentive and observational
Sometimes the most impactful designs are not measurable features, but a single step in a workflow or additional clarity in a state change. It can be difficult to identify such subtleties, as they may not be explicitly pointed out. Be intensely vigilant to what a person is looking at, how they are multitasking, and what signals are causing a corresponding action. Observing that someone is having to constantly look up a location’s map coordinates for some type of problem, for example, is a strong signal that the interface should be more contextually aware of location data.
Altogether, although the external customer will never be directly exposed to internal tools, they certainly feel the effects when operations can’t find the relevant information or be able to make quick decisions. A well-oiled engine and a smooth running operations team mean a happy trucker on the road!
