In its journey to digitize air freight, Freightos pursued enterprise-shipper spot rates by offering a solution that provides full transparency into their shipment planning — something that does not exist at all today, since enterprise shippers are solely dependent on their freight forwarder.
Responsibilities
Research
Ideation
Prototype
UX & UI design
Motion & interactions
The team
Guy Laor, VP UX & Design
Ian M. Arroyo, EVP, Strategy & Demand
Naama Tzarfati, Senior Product Manager
Cristina Sampaio, Product designer
The challenge
Today, enterprise shippers have little-to-no visibility into their shipments. To get a freight quote, they must send 3-5 different freight forwarders an email with their shipment load, point of origin/destination, and arrival date and time. After 24-72 hours, they usually receive a quote.
But even with a freight quote, most shippers don’t have important information on their shipment – itinerary, accurate departure and arrival dates and time, or even the carrier. This can impact costs and delivery times. Having all this Information pre-booking can benefit enterprise shippers through better planning, control, and knowledge of their shipments.
This case study will focus on the matrix search results solution which was designed for enterprise shippers with the major airlines collaboration that provided their APIs.
In 2019, this feature was applied and issued as a patent by European Union Intellectual Property Office.
The Process
Research
We set out on a journey to understand how enterprise shippers operate. We wanted to learn how they request quotes, what their day-to-day looks like, the way they book and manage numerous shipments, how they work with freight forwarders, customs brokers, with their own factories, and how they handle shipment exceptions.
This journey included Interviewing key stakeholders at companies like Volvo, Perry Ellis International, Target, and more.
I also performed what I call “desk research”, or reading about the industry and specific issues-related. This includes surveys and articles.
All these data points led to great quantitative and qualitative insights:
Key research findings
Meet some of our users and their main pain points
01.
Poor communication
Slow response and support times on forwarders behalf.
02.
Missing shipment information
The direct cause for delays and extra costs.
03.
Poor visibility
Leading to no control over shipments.
Industry survey
According to the Supply chain report Covering 1,700 companies:
Of shippers have partial visibility into their supply chain
Of shippers have no visibility into their supply chain at all
Ideate
After conducting the research and gathering all data and insights, we felt confident to start discussing and brainstorming features for the product roadmap.
How can we help them?
At this stage, together with the team and following our conversations with users, I translate insights into users’ needs and then into features.
User flow
Even though the flow is complicated and dependent on a lot of variables (mainly because of airlines’ APIs) we knew there was a lot we could do at this stage to help enterprise shippers better plan their shipments and prevent additional costs and frustrations that usually come post-booking.
Prototype
Wireframes
Now that I had enough information I started wireframing the ideas. I wireframed the tiles and layout separately, exploring different options. I used pencil & paper for fast iterations and moved to mid-fidelity for testing with users before final design.
Pencil & Paper
Mid Fidelity
Mid fidelity wireframes are my way to quickly test ideas and design with users and team members. They don’t cost much and can generate meaningful insights and ideas before moving to development.
Final design
For the visual design, we used Freightos design system – Singularity. You can view it here.
The impact
Unfortunately, I left Freightos before I could watch this feature come to life. It was released on July 29th, 2020 as part of Freightos’ company WebCargo.
You can read about it in AirCargo Eye magazine, and in Cargo Forwarder or watch a video by one of WebCargo users explaining how it changed the way he works.