Worldwide Express

SPEEDSHIP™, LEADERSHIP

2019-2021

Speedship™

Approach

SpeedShip™ is a 3rd party transportation management platform for UPS and Freight shipments. It’s a B2B2C web application that allows small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to quickly compare, book, track, manage, and insure shipments across the world.

Worldwide Express (WWEX) outsourced discovery research, user testing, and tech resources from Projekt202 to build this greenfield product as a solution for the issues within the legacy platform.

The legacy platform has arranged over 25 million shipments annually for over 92 thousand SMB clients. 4 years and over $60 million dollars later, SpeedShip™ launched in April 2021.

Problems

Across all 5 customer user personas, over 56% of customers prefer the self-service option within the legacy platform because of over 21 identified usability pain points.

After surveying all 4 internal personas, 11 identified pain points have caused over 47% of them to create a manual workaround in the legacy platform.

The #1 reason customers left within 6 months on the platform was WWEX “does nothing special”, which costs $200 million per year in revenue churn.

Goals

  1. Launch SpeedShip™ within 3 years.

  2. Improve usability by providing users with a guided user experience in booking and managing shipments. 

  3. Leverage historic customer data for an enhanced user experience for external personas.

  4. Improve platform usability and enhanced customer support capabilities for internal personas.

EXPERIENCE DESIGN

EXPERIENCE DESIGN

I was hired to lead the design as we transitioned from an external partner to an in-house distributed team within a development-led organization.

We as a distributed design team of 5 collaborated with 9 different cross-functional teams designing SpeedShip™.

We overcame limited budgets, hard deadlines, a reduction in resources, and the absence of a prioritized featured list.

I was able to successfully implement initiatives that led to increased productivity and a highly rated MVP successfully launched to market.

Legacy

Prior to hiring Projekt202 to lead the research and MVP design, the legacy platform, led by technology, got the job done for users at the expense of usability and aesthetics.

I was given the blessing to develop and communicate a clear design strategy and vision that aligns with the company's strategic goals and OKRs. Part of that strategy was to improve the cross-functional collaboration processes with a standardized brief.

Inconsistent user story writing became a paint point that hindered team productivity, but design and product created a repeatable template to address the issue.

In alignment meetings, we discussed and provided visibility of resource allocation, capacity, and level of effort for all cross-functional work streams on our product roadmap.

Through SAFe Agile practices, our PI planning sessions enabled cross-functional pods to align their plans, identify dependencies, and avoid duplicating work over a few days.

To combat stakeholder focus on SpeedShip™'s UI by using wireframes and flows in meetings. This keeps us grounded in user-centric design, mapping happy and alternate paths to ensure comprehensive solutions. Alignment between product, design, and development is improved with this approach, resulting in exceptional user experiences.

To improve our design workflow, we replaced Zeplin with Sketch and InVision in our design stack. To address issues with lost or outdated files saved locally, I introduced Abstract for managing our Sketch files.

Outcomes

Previous

Wayfair
Next

7-Eleven