Location Intelligence Overview
Location Intelligence is an industry first, centralized database and crowd sourcing platform of shippers and receivers at scale. Location Intel has aggregated anonymized data across a variety of sources. It was designed to connect carriers, their drivers and companies with shipping and receiving facilities. These locations include distribution centers, grocery, retail chains, industrial, manufacturing centers, etc.
I was tasked with designing an MVP for shipping and receiving facilities to have visibility into their own operations as well as giving carriers a holistic picture of what servicing these locations entail.
The overall premise of this project is to give users, either owners, managers of facilities, and drivers a better way to understand the data at each location to offer insight and to make better decisions overall to optimize their time.
Company: Solera Omnitracs
Role: Research UX/UI Design
Platform: Desktop
Timeline: Ongoing
Tools: Adobe XD
Team: Product Manager, Engineers + Data Architects
Research
I previously worked in the logistics industry as a broker, and had an abundance of my own assumptions. To further understand and validate my assumptions I combed the internet for articles pertaining to problems which drivers face on a daily basis. The following stood out to me, and is followed with further insights of my findings.
“In a survey of top concerns for trucking, and for a third year in a row, detention/delay at customer facilities is a top ten industry concern. The increase in delays creates cascading impacts for drivers as their available hours of service are wasted. They are often denied access to restroom facilities while waiting, and are in many cases not allowed to remain at a customer facility if they run out of available driving hours. It is not surprising that detention/delay at customer facilities is ranked as the highest concern among commercial driver respondents.”
— American Transportation Research Institute
Insights
Detention at customer facilities is a top 10 industry concern.
Increase in delay creates cascading impact on available driver hours. This delay takes away from their drivable hours. They legally can drive a maximum of 10 hours after 8 consecutive hours off duty.
Long haul drivers live on the road. Having access to driver amenities is crucial for their survival.
Surprisingly many truck drivers spend more time waiting at facilities to load or unload cargo instead of being on the road.
If drivers and their companies have more knowledge of what to expect at facilities, they would be able to make better decisions in planning, which could help them increase productivity.
Further research shows that detention times not only have a negative impact on driver productivity, but are also known to increase crash risk for drivers.
“24% of drivers calling on warehouse and distribution centers said there were no available restrooms and drivers being denied access to them.”
— FreightWaves.com
“Drivers spend as many as 40 hours a week at customer locations waiting for their trailers to be loaded or unloaded.”
— Freightech.us
The Problem
Carriers and truck drivers need a way to understand facility expectations and offerings in order to effectively plan and increase productivity.
“Anybody been to McCall Farms in Effington, SC to unload? Curious to know how long they take.”
— Truck Driver
Findings
After presenting my findings to internal stakeholders and my Product Manager, I was presented with a list of requirements for an MVP which was to be built out as a web solution. I made my case to design this MVP as a mobile first solution, but unfortunately received push back. In my opinion the target-users were truck drivers. After all, the main reason we started this project was to offer insight on the data and analytics of locations that drivers service on a daily basis, and to offer a way for them to reduce the time that they spend at these locations.
Further research led to an understanding that receivers and shippers wanted to gain visibility into various metrics and data points. Having this data could prove to be beneficial for facilities to identify trends and build relationships with drivers by being transparent in how their facility works. Having the ability to identify trends from this data gives facilities actionable information to improve their productivity as well. I tried to look at things at different angles, and although we transitioned our target-users to property owners, location owners, and 3PL’s, I still kept drivers in the back of my mind as potential future users.
Product Requirements
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Design a page to allow users access to Location Intelligence.
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Design a way for internal and external users to search for a location.
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The following were to be included on location pages:
Location Name
Location Type — Shipper + receiver, carrier terminal, last-mile location, truck stops, weigh stations, truck parking
Contact information
Business hours
Driver Amenities — Overnight parking, restrooms, vending machines, showers, breakroom, and wi-fi availability.
Services Offered — Lumper service (3rd party workers who help to load or unload freight)
Interactive map — Displaying location, geofence, and truck paths.
Data and Analytics — Design a way to display driver visits. Weekly, monthly, and duration of driver location visits.
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Design a way for users to edit location details including business hours, driver amenities, closures, location type, location name, contact information, appointment scheduling, safety requirements, and procedures.
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Allowing location site owners to claim and maintain their receiving and shipping directory.
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We implemented a rating system within Sylectus Driver, a mobile application for drivers. Drivers are prompted to rate their experiences at locations they visit. This data from the mobile app was to be used to give insight on these locations.
Ideation
Based off of the product requirements presented to me, I started to conceptualize ways to display the necessary requirements. Halfway through this project Omnitracs was going through a rebrand, and it was not defined yet what that would entail. Once that rebrand was completed I continuously iterated on my designs to ensure that the design direction aligned with the product requirements necessary for our MVP.
Current State Iterative Designs
Shortly after the rebrand of Omnitracs, our company was acquired by Solera. It was important to align and iterate my designs to follow Solera’s brand guidelines. The following were designed from the product requirements which were presented.
Login
Allowing users an access point to Location Intelligence. This includes internal and external users. Functionality has not yet been built out for external users to create an account, and internal users are currently setting up external accounts for beta users.
Location Search
Searching for locations includes a visual representation on a map and filtering locations by location types (shipper + receiver, carrier terminal, last-mile location, truck stops, weigh stations, and truck parking). A toggle was built to be able to search by either location name or address. I pushed to simplify the location search, but because of resource constraints the stakeholder’s decision was to include a toggle.
Location
Location Type — Shipper + receiver, carrier terminal, last-mile location, truck stops, weigh stations, truck parking
Contact Information
Business Hours
Driver Amenities — Overnight parking, restrooms, vending machines, showers, breakroom, and wi-fi availability.
Services Offered — Lumper service.
Interactive Map — Displaying location, geofence, and truck paths.
Data and Analytics — Graphs and charts to represent driver visits and time spent at locations.
Along with these requirements, functionality and design was built out for a company to set relationships with other locations. These included:
Property Owner — Commercial real-estate company that owns the building.
Company Location — Company’s warehouse or manufacturing plant.
Customer — Location that a company is servicing for their customer.
3PL — Third party logistics provider representing warehousing space not owned or run by the company.
Location Edits
Building out the functionality to edit location details in a way is to give location owners a way to inform other user types about their location.
Next Steps + Final Thoughts
Currently this project is sourcing and being tested with beta users to validate the decision from a business perspective to move forward. The roadmap includes public facing pages to inform of our solution and to get potential customers excited, along with making pages responsive for mobile and tablet devices.
If there was something I would’ve done differently about this project it would’ve been to go mobile first and validate the need for a solution more quickly. I continuously was an advocate for drivers, and tried to state my case that drivers were the target-users, but unfortunately was denied. I think that this product has a a lot of potential to become great, and I believe it a product that can be extremely beneficial for the entire logistics industry. Again, I just think that we were trying to do too much, too quickly, without any real validation. Management believed that because a rather large database had to be built to store information on over 6 million locations, building in web was the way to go. I see the importance and business perspective of having users access Location Intelligence from a desktop, and agree that there are many different types of users, but because of how the problem was presented to me, it didn’t make sense to build out the desktop version first. In my opinion, I think we were given a lot of requirements, in a short amount of time for a product that is only now being validated with beta users.