Convoy BOOST
Convoy’s core business matches truck drivers to customers that require freight transportation. Other brokers have traditionally done the same thing, but with little to no technology assistance.
A small incubation team and I conceptualized an experience where other brokers, normally competitors, could leverage and adopt our platform in a way that had a positive impact on the overall freight market.
OVERVIEW
Objectives
The core experience we wanted to deliver was an accessible, transparent, and secure way for other brokers to partner their network of customers and truck drivers onto our platform. The value of doing so is immense: all the brokers involved would have greater access to an even larger network of available trucking capacity; carriers and drivers would in turn have a broader selection of jobs.
Initial research and design was approximitely 3 months, with a first early access version available to a limited audience completed in 6 months.
My Role
My role was the senior designer and researcher, working with a team of 1x product manager and 4x engineers. Tasks included:
Working with a small incubation team to create a "startup within a startup"
Competitive research
Interviewing and synthesizing direct research participants and surveys
Service design
Visual design and prototyping
Report to the executive team
Exploration
Initial Research
One of the early known challenges was getting traditional competitors to feel that such a close partnership had positive value for their business and was trustworthy. To explore this concept, together with a business analyst, I conducted several rounds of interviews, both anonymous through research services and directly with existing partners. I wanted to identify core areas of concern, as well as what workflows were needed to provide reassurance and transparency.
The data from the research sessions fell into two broad categories. Some takeaways were more business, legal, and cost related, of which was left to business analysts and go-to-market team to spearhead. The remainder was around how these potential partners would use our network through a web app. Unsurprisingly, many of their requirements mirrored our own:
How to post and match with a truck driver that is reliable, with a fair and attractive payout?
How to track and manage the movement of freight?
Managing the requisite documentations and paying out the driver?
Through this, I developed a roadmap of features from priority to nice to have, as well as mapping out the journey and various tasks and concerns through the workflow of creating, booking, assign, executing, and paying out a shipment.
Design
"Re-exploring" the Unknown
Having designed our own internal operations screens, we knew from experience and research that many of the same controls and data points would be equally valuable to Boost users. However, it needed to be adaptable to suit other workflows and models. Because of this, I took the core screens that I had previously designed and re-explored them from a more general perspective.
Outcomes and Next Steps
Boost is a highly innovative and powerful way for the freight industry to work together to improve the general network of how freight is moved. Our initial release was to a select few partners, and early results indicated that these partners had high confidence and trust, and were able to increase the overall effectiveness of their business. Following the early access, there were several areas around integrating with our core services that we were manually handling that would need more design thought and implementation before we were confident with a general release.
“While there are some instances where we compete with Convoy, there’s more opportunity for both of us when we work together. Convoy for Brokers complements our existing truckload offering—it’s helped us grow our load volume and increase the productivity of our team by making it easier to access trucks through their marketplace and technology.” -Senior VP, USA Truck
Ⓒ 2024 ROBIN FU 付如斌