Jensen is something of a dream client. The project began with an introduction to their business ( concrete precasting ) and the stakeholders who would be involved in the project. I was given time to familiarize myself with the existing application their employees were using for dispatching, order tracking, and shipment scheduling. The redesign was tied to the company sunsetting a previous technology they'd used to build the dispatching tool, so there was a lot of freedom and collaboration with their tech team as a result. The project began with a deep dive into understanding their users and the application's impact on those users. The list of users comprised dispatchers, managers, truck drivers, sales people, and customers, so, needless to say, a broad audience to understand. I did site visits with their corporate office, as well as three other locations across the western US. During these visits I was able to shadow site managers, dispatchers, truck drivers and those working in the concrete yard. It was quite the learning experience. Due to travel and coordination, this piece of the project took a month just to complete the site visits. Interviews were conducted with individuals from all of the various disciplines at each site, in addition to a few hours of shadowing each discipline. All of this data was recorded via iphone in the form of video, audio, and photographs to be compiled later.
Once the on-site research was completed, I returned to my studio at home to compile and make sense of the gathered data to present to the team at Jensen with suggestions of how to move forward. Parallel to this was evaluating the current component and design assets, as well as familiarizing myself with Jensen's tech stack and its limitations to avoid designing outside of the tech stacks capability. This aspect involved a deep dive with the tech lead at Jensen.
Using the information gathered in the onsite research, I put myself in the shoes of each role and attempted to complete the script I'd given them using the current application in order to have a first-hand feel of what users were experiencing. It's my belief that hands on research ideally must occur early in the discovery process to avoid the inevitable bias that creeps in with familiarity with a product experience. After compiling the data and my walkthroughs of the tasks, I presented this in a high-level deck to the team, touching on key points and challenges which included but were not limited to:
• Lag time based on the current software implementation which forced users to resort to excel and other methods to track orders
• No obvious way to view the current or upcoming orders for the week causing back and forth between internal and external customers to verify orders
• All disciplines' views were largely the same, very little ability to customize to your job
• Disjointed and antiquated look and feel causing a general distrust in the application
After presenting this information, the team and I identified priorities to focus on for the initial rework of the application. Given we were up against a very real deadline of sunsetting the current app, we had to streamline and prioritize.
The next stage was to develop a series of wireframes and prototypes to share with users. Given that the various users of the app ranged from inexperienced to tech savvy, I decided to go with a higher fidelity approach on the wireframes and prototypes. This decision proved fruitful as users weren't confused by the abstract aspect that low-fi wireframes often have. Testing was done remotely using Teams meetings, and presented to both workers and executives alike for input.
We did multiple testing of both usability and potential functionality before any code modifications were made. That said, after initial approval of look and feel was given, the dev team jumped right in and started creating the necessary components and css so we wouldn't have to slow down once the entirety of the design was approved.
Once launched, we conducted post-mortem interviews with users, using a bottom up approach. Our main concern was to ensure the dispatchers not only found the update better from a day to day usage standpoint, but also something they'd feel more confident incorporating more into their workflow. The result was happier, more effective dispatchers, which lead to a better overall scheduling and delivery process company-wide. The team was now comfortable seeing the dispatch tool as a single source of truth regarding orders, shipments, and deliveries.