SaaS - Tolls Management System

Overview

Commerce Logic is B2B SaaS product for commercial carriers. Their main target are businesses that operate trucks that move in the US using toll roads.

There are more than 135 toll agencies in US (mostly do not Interact with each other).There are about 10 000 toll plazas across the country in total.

My role

I led the design of the pickup experience between January 2022 and September 2022 and collaborated with one other Junior Designer. During my work on the project Trips and Fleet feature, more small improvements were added. I worked alongside 2 Product Managers, a Researcher, and Development Team of 6 awesome people.

Main niche problem

We conducted customer and market research to drive our planning phase.These are the key insights that defined the launch version of the product:

When leaving a «home area» the driver encounters another toll system that is incompatible with his toll tag, since he has a different financial relationship with another toll agency

Some companies offer a single tag to unify the bill for commercial carriers as they move across the country

Tolls should be integrated into delivery costs to create a much more value-added proposition of projecting costs based on time, traffic, delivery delays, etc. Global value is to provide an intelligent tolling solution

Current competitors couldn't provide all possible alternative roads with costs for the drivers

Team approach to design process

Empathise: Trying to understand the target user and his main pain points, looking threw his behaviors, and frustrations

Define: Conducting user research methods such as interviews, surveys, and usability tests to gain a deeper understanding of the user's needs and goals

Ideate: Generating ideas and solutions through brainstorming with a team, sketching, and wireframing.

Prototype: Providing the high fidelity design to the client and target users, making user testings and getting feedback

Trips feature

Problem:

Users could not track all the different tags in their systems, other Tags management systems are not adapted to all tags providers. In the end, very often Logistics companies has miscalculations, issues with tracking expenses.

Solution:

After long interviews and brainstorms two solutions was provided. Our system was adapted to calculate all Tags system (this part was mostly development part).

Universal tag solution was provided, which will be able to gather data from all Tags systems automatically.

Before the tag was created, the trips solution was created, which recommended the best trip, by the tags driver already had, trip also was calculating the expenses for every road trip.

Fleet feature

Problem:

Fleet Management has the information about the trucks, but they were not able to track the data of the fleet changes like trailers, weight, height, and similar.

Solution:

Interviews have shown, that the main reason why it was happening was that the papers from drivers were always delayed, and it took even more time to add this information for Fleet Managers. Drivers on the other way didn't have any access to the system to enter this data as well.

We tested a few simple things. Firstly we created an account for drivers, where they could edit only mandatory information which was needed for the fleet managers. Secondly, the fleet manager could send app reminders to the drivers to provide the data.

Testing has shown us, that for drivers it is much easier to fill some fields than to make scans and send the documentation to fleet management via email. Also, fleet management was happy that they didn't have to fill in any extra data.

Roadblocks

In this project, my main roadblock was that client thought that he knows all the issues, and he even wasn't trying to give any access to employees or drivers. I had a lot of challenges to discuss this problem with a client, and convincing him that the result can be much better if we as a team will interview employees and drivers. After multiple trying, I just proposed to allow interviewing one fleet manager and one driver and give them to test our prototypes which we were creating without that process. The client was really surprised, at how many changes were proposed by these people, and he was happy to try more interviews and user testing after.

Conclusion

Even if I wasn't too long on this project, I had time to explore it quite deeply and implement some of my changes. The current team is working with processes I have implemented, and my current employer is still in touch with me if he needs some ideas. I loved this project, but the promotion obligated me to move forward. My main point is not to be afraid to experiment and try to bring your value to the team, even if the client is closed in the beginning, do not stop trying, one small successful step, can change a lot in the future.

More screens