So what’s the problem?

Coyote Logistic’s business model has always been high-touch human service. Their product was a complex enterprise system that grew over time with features being added at the requests of large shippers — customers with teams of dedicated sales reps working on their behalf.

A small business owner or company with no dedicated sales rep was a user type that Coyote had never accounted for until recent years. Coyote’s quick solution to accommodate these new users amounted to removing a small number of features from the existing enterprise solution.

The result was a clunky application with disparate features lacking focus. Most important, it didn’t take into account the actual needs of the user.

The Goal

We had already captured much of the enterprise market, and Uber was starting to gain a lot of traction targeting smaller businesses. How could we deliver an experience that met the needs of a new customer base, admist fierce new competition?

Let’s meet our users

The first step was to talk to our new users. We lacked a fundamental understanding of who self-servicing shippers were.

I scheduled 12 thirty-minute user interviews spanning two weeks. In order to maintain consistency ensure that we obtained the insights we needed, I created a conversation protocol to guide the interviews.

The ultimate goal of the user interviews was to better understand what types of businesses would prefer self servicing versus working through a sales rep, and surface user needs specific to the self service workflow.

Early Insights

We were able to confirm our understanding that self-service customers tended to have low shipment volumes (small business sizes). Our interviewees moved anywhere from 1-10 shipments weekly with Coyote. This was a huge difference from our enterprise customers who moved hundreds of shipments daily.

• "A lot of times I have to email or chase down someone to get tracking updates. A really simple platform to just look where a shipment is at would be helpful." - D

• "A Domino's like pizza tracker to track shipments would be amazing." - S

• "Mobile would be huge. I’m on the go all the time. Tracking shipments and easily scheduling loads on mobile would be huge". - J

• "Price is important, but service is an absolute must" - A

Workshop

I decided to host a digital workshop with Product and Development to review my research findings, as this would shape our shipper product strategy.

I gathered insightful quotes from the user interview as well as competitor screenshots onto a Miro board, organized by workflow swimlanes. The goal of the workshop was to ideate on self-service user needs, with the context of user quotes and competitor screenshots.

My Proposal : Segment our digital experience based on user type.

Instead of modifying the enterprise solution to fit self-service user needs in a Frankenstein manner, I proposed a segmented experience for our self-service users.

Customer Insight 1: Where’s my shipment?

Without an exception, every user that I spoke to in my user research mentioned tracking as the main reason they log onto our digital platform. For every one shipment users move, they check the tracking status multiple times. In fact, many users said that the first thing they do when they walk in the office is to check the tracking on live shipments.

Our user data supported this. On the homepage dashboard, only one widget was heavily used, nearing 90,000 clicks a month versus the less than 1,000 clicks on every other widget. This widget contained quick links that allowed users to view shipments based on delivery times or status.

For the landing page on my new design, I removed the dashboard and replaced it with a new page designed for managing active shipments and tracking. The dashboard had provided little value to users and only served as a gateway to view tracking. In this way, we would be replacing a screen that was not valuable for our user and immediately offering a view on tracking on the homepage.

We were able to heavily leverage components from our truck driver-facing applications such as the interactive map with information cards, as the truck driver experience had been prioritized first and modernized by my design colleague. This helped reduce time to market and development cost significantly, as well as helped to maintain a consistent design across user types.

Customer Insight 2: More doesn’t mean better

Self-service users get quotes, pay for shipments, and track. My user interviews did not point to any additional user needs for self-service users. Yet, these key actions were hidden on our main navigation.

This was the result of maintaining the menu structure of our enterprise platform and simply removing pages for self-service users without considering final usability. For example, there was a parent menu for “Financials”, with only one page (“Accounting”) in the menu dropdown.

I simplified our navigation with a focus on making the actions of Quoting, Shipping, and Paying as clear as possible. I removed unnecessary parent menus to surface the pages that aligned with user needs, and removed pages that fell outside of these key actions. I partnered with our data analyst to check the click-rate and page activity from our Google Analytics data while making these key decisions.

Customer Insight 3: Mobility is money

One unexpected insight from user interviews was an interest in mobile capabilities. While Coyote has a mobile app for carriers (truck drivers), Coyote had never invested in mobile for shippers because they were believed to be office employees booking and managing shipments on desktop.

While this was certainly true for huge enterprises like Coca Cola who had hundreds of guaranteed shipments daily, I learned that smaller shippers also doubled as sales reps for their companies. Multiple interviewees mentioned business meetings with potential buyers where the ability to get quotes and view tracking information on mobile would be extremely valuable.

Creating an entire mobile app would be too large of an investment. However one easy area for improvement was improving the usability of responsive designs.

Customer Insight 4: Recurring shipment lanes

Another surprising discovery during user interviews were that small businesses tended to move a consistent number of shipments to the same destinations. This was a big contrast to our enterprise users who moved so many shipments, that while a company may be active in one region of the United States, there were hundreds of different common destinations.

During the workshop, we came up with the idea of “requote”. This was inspired by the concept of reloading with truck drivers, which is a feature that makes it easy for truck drivers book shipments close or near to the path that they’re on. Requoting with shippers essentially was a one-button click to get an up-to-date quote on the same destination and immediately post their shipment after agreeing to then updated price.

This was an exciting feature because we believed that it would help with retention by making it very easy for users to

Phased Rollout

We decided on a phased rollout to a test group of 200 small business, including those I had conducted my user interviews with. We closely monitored metrics such as number of requoted shipments and average number of times users checked tracking until delivery. We also had our customer-facing teams reach out to these businesses to uncover more qualitative feedback.

The feedback was largely positive, and we are currently planning out phased releases to a much larger group of users.