Analytics empowering brokers and carriers of any scale

Company
DAT Freight and Analytics
Industry
Supply chain and logistics
My role
Head of UX (research and design)
Employment duration
2.6 years (2019 - 2021)
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TL;DR

Head of UX research and design
Hands on design for first 8 months. Creative and UX direction after I hired a team of designers.

The product was awarded the top technology provider award by Food Logistics in 2021.

"The in and outbound market conditions index is a game changer for our operations team"
VP, Kingsgate Logistics

Context

The end users
Frontline workers in logistics, warehouses and asset-based businesses (carriers)
The customer goal
Ensure shipper, brokers and carriers have business intelligence with customizable reports on freight rates, supply-demand and market trends.
The business goal
Provide business intelligence data through visualizations and an intuitive user interface. DAT wanted to empower their customers to expand their business via budget strategies, identify underperforming areas and reduce request for proposal (RFP) timelines.
The product hypothesis
DAT had limited reporting and analytics  via Tableau for its enterprise customers. There was an opportunity to provide a subscription based service via a cloud based ecosystem for customers of any scale.
UX research goal
Validate the hypothesis, user goals, pain points and use cases, and recommend outcomes in order of priority.

The opportunity and outcome

DAT was consolidating their tech stack from legacy systems to AWS which offered a an opportunity to completely rethink the user interface.
Key to success:
Data integration, data analytics
Transform big to better data through traceability and quality control as a basis for AI enablement
Security and governance
Results:
On demand dashboards allowed customers negotiating leverage, anticipate changes in rates, get advanced 7-day forecasts of future conditions and compare markets throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Customer outcome:
"Our forecasting confidence went up dramatically after using DAT's Market Conditions feature. We ended our contract with TruckerTools and established DAT as our preferred BI provider"
SVP, Business Strategy Lineage Logistics

My role and responsibility

Hands-on leadership that included:
Validating hypothesis through qualitative research, observation and ethnography. Designing product MVP that was user tested at DATCON, DAT's customer conference

Early sketches based on use cases. (Sketching, Miro)
Sessions with product, engineering and data science team  (whiteboard)
Mapping data models to the UI. Data viz explorations. (Miro and Figma)
Market conditions lookup. Hi fidelity designs in Figma
Hot lanes, rates and conditions lookup