VOYAGER

Case Study

Problem:

I was privileged to help come up with a solution that would help Voyager, a maritime supply chain industry start-up, to bring more users to their collaboration platform. Bringing people together is something that I’m very passionate about, and for this project, we needed to discover why users were not logging onto the platform where they can collaborate with other members in the supply chain to complete tasks.

Approach:

Our team worked in Sprints over a three week period following the design thinking process.

My Role:

• Domain research

• Heuristic evaluation

• User interviews

• Subject matter expert interviews

• Paper and low-fidelity wireframes

• Usability testing

Empathize

Domain Research:

Starting out in Sprint one, I dove into the marketplace to learn as much as I could about the industry in just a few days. Through my domain research, I was able to uncover current and future trends in maritime supply chain industry.

Competitive Analysis:

Our team conducted a competitive analysis to understand the competitors in the marketplace and uncover any gaps in the market.

Heuristic Evaluation:

I also evaluated the current platform based on the seven heuristics of Neilson. Understanding the flow of the current platform, allowed me to make recommendations for a more intuitive flow.

SME interviews:

To get a more personal look at the industry, I wanted to interview some of Voyager’s current users. Due to time constraints and lack of response from users, I was unfortunately unable to accomplish this. That did not stop the team, however, as we were able to track down some subject matter experts (SME) from outside the current user base who agreed to be interviewed.

The Babysitting Effect

“It’s called babysitting. You have to care about that cargo, like if it's your own property, and make sure it goes from point A to point B. And it all gets there in one piece.”

The Human Factor

“You have to bring that personal touch, add your personality to tie bonds with the customer and other parties involved.”

Tech Saturated Industry

“Usually the container companies have a platform where you can just easily track a container by inputting the container number or BOL and they'll give you daily updates on where the location of that container is”

Define

Problem Statement:

All of this research lead me to create an informed problem statement so the team would have a clear vision of the problem that needed to be solved for this project.

“A freight forwarder in the maritime supply chain industry requires a convenient, intuitive, and efficient platform to review, upload, and share important tasks and information so that clients can better track, monitor, organize, and archive important supply chain documents and data.”

Personas:

The team struggled with pin-pointing one specific persona for this project so two research-backed personas were created. After careful debate and consideration, the team chose one persona which we felt would help us to stay focused on the audience that we were striving to help.

Ideate

Affinity Diagram:

Armed with all the information that was gathered, our team conducted a divergent thinking affinity diagramming session with the client to narrow in on solving the problem.

Low-fidelity Wireframes:

Using these ideas, I came up with some concepts that could potentially solve Voyager’s problem. In doing this, I created paper wireframes.

Mid-fi wireframes:

Heading into Sprint two, the team presented our findings to the client and got feedback. We then converged upon our diverse concept ideas to come up with a final solution to the problem. Based on this solution, a mid-fidelity prototype was created for user testing utilizing Sketch and Axure.

Prototype

Check out the prototype here

Test

Usability Testing:

I then conducted remote user testing of this prototype in Sprint Three. During testing, some interesting findings were unearthed including some details that would have helped us during the earlier research phase.

User Testing Affinity Diagram:

To synthesize our findings, the team conducted and affinity diagramming session.

Discoveries & Outcomes

Key Discoveries:

Users liked the color coding of the overdue, pending, and completed tasks
Having the number of overdue tasks on the dashboard was helpful to the user.
Having everything on one tab for the task box was more convenient for the user.
The user preferred having more detail on the voyages overview as opposed to having it under separate tabs. i.e. KPI and voyage schedule
The notifications don’t always load properly according to a user. Having the notifications on the left menu will make them more efficient to access.

User Suggestions & Refinements:

Using feedback from user testing, refinements were made to the original mid-fidelity prototype.

On the Tasks and Voyages screen specify the number of days the task has been overdue, and if it's pending, show how many days are remaining to complete it.

Keep all ports in the voyage overview by adding a timeline of the ports with more info about the current port.

When adding a member in the Task box, have the ability to search by name or email because sometimes the user only has the email but not the name.

Outcomes:

Working with an existing product was a bit different than working on one from the groud up.
Working as a team helps when everyone has defined roles and responsibilities
Working in Sprints really helped us to maintain focus.
When dealing with an existing product, it can be challenging to get cooperation from existing users.