Carrier Management

In this comprehensive UX design project, I undertook the challenge of enhancing carrier management experience. Recognizing the critical role that carriers play in the transportation ecosystem, I set out to streamline and optimize the user experience for our onboarding team to effectively manage and onboard carriers. In addition, I worked with the product manager to refactor the structure of our carriers/drivers/trucks so that it would be clear to the user who's managing this.

Before diving into the design, we need to understand what the current carrier management tool (legacy system) looks like and what needs to be improved from the users' perspective.

After collecting feedback and done a few discovery sessions with our direct users, I found that there are different type of issues causing the bad user experience.

OO/Driver and dispatcher are on 2 different pages: whenever users (from our carrier onboarding team) search an account by a driver name, they don’t always know the account type of this driver, if they don’t find it on the OO/Driver list page, they will have to switch to the Dispatcher list to search again.

The information architecture of carrier’s info is disoriented. Carrier info lives in different modals depends on the account types.

In real life scenario, a user’s role changes over time. There are drivers start working as owner operators, once they earn enough money, they can afford to purchase more trucks and hire fleet drivers to haul loads for them. However, there’s no way in our system to turn an OO account into a Dispatcher account. This has created a lot inconvenience for both our internal (carrier onboarding team) users and carriers.

We don’t have enough carrier status to describe what’s going on with every carrier precisely.

Example 1: Once a user starts the reviewing process with a new carrier account, there’s no way to indicate that the account is under review. Without knowing the account has been worked on, another user might start to work on the same account.

Example 2: Approved carrier’s status turns to “pending” state if the insurance is expired, user is not able to tell that this was an approved carrier or a new sign up carrier that is waiting for approval.

Based on the discovery, I shared the major problems and potential solutions with the product team. We had couple discussion on how we can prioritize this different pieces because the scope of the project is bigger than we expected.

• A new sign-up will create a carrier entity that associates with an admin account.
• Admin account holder can create multiple user accounts under this carrier entity.
• If a carrier entity has only one child account, the account needs to be both admin and driver roles, system will consider this carrier entity as OO.
• If a carrier entity has more than two child account checked with driver role, system will consider this carrier entity as Fleet.

1. (Auto) All required documents and info fields are submitted
2. (Manual) Users mark status as “In-Review”
3. (Manual) Users approve carrier
4. (Auto) Agreement documents received.
5. (Auto) Insurance expired
6. (Auto) Expired insurance updated

After we made the decision on all the data structure and state machines changes, I started to focus on the visual portion of the project.

The new account structure allows us to present a better information architecture to the users. I also designed an exception list that would be helpful for users to quickly review/approve/deny carriers at different stages during the whole onboarding process.

A carrier account owns a page that contains multiple tabs to organize different types of info. With the enhanced information architecture design, users can easily locate specific carrier info whenever they want.

We need to satisfy 4 major user needs on this carrier list:

1. Find the new sign-up carriers that are ready for review.
2. Call the new sign-up carrier and ask them to submit all required documents.
3. Quick search for a specific carrier when that carrier calls us for questions.
4. Remind the carrier to update insurance info when the expiration date is close.

Global Search

When carrier onboarding team tries to search a particular carrier in our system, they usually have only one type of info, sometimes it’s the carrier business owner’s name, sometimes it’s the fleet driver’s name, sometimes it’s the company’s identity number. Therefore, we need to have a global search capability so that our users can quickly find the account with fuzzy key words.

Filters

Sometimes global search can only reduce the list to a certain amount, in this case, we need more filters to further narrow down the result so that users can get the exact account.

Carrier Notes

Carrier notes is a essential tool for users in various scenarios. Especially during the reviewing process, displaying notes on the list reminds the users know what’s the action item for next step.

It is also a communication tool among onboarding team users.

Users need to identify and resolve exceptions before they can approve a carrier. I consolidated these exceptions and turned them into a to-do list to help them quickly find out what’s missing before they can click the ‘approve’ button.