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Industry SPONSORED
Streamlining Highway's Directory to Optimize Carrier Vetting Workflows for Freight Brokers
information architecture
contextual inquiries
prototyping
mental model mapping
Fall 2024
Scope
Our team at IU Bloomington partnered with Highway to improve their broker platform. Highway provides freight brokerage tools that connect freight brokers with reliable carriers and help verify carrier identities.
Our scope was limited to the Highway Directory — a crucial tool where brokers find and validate carrier contact information to detect for potential fraud carriers.
Our challenge was to reduce the cognitive overload brokers experience when processing the directory's numerous data points to verify a carrier.
My Role
On-ground Work
Conducted a comprehensive platform audit and reviewed help articles to build foundational domain knowledge.
Developed semi-structured protocols for stakeholder interviews and contextual inquiries.
Led and facilitated stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiries, and usability testing sessions.
Synthesized research findings into user flows and mental model diagrams.
Planned and facilitated card sorting sessions to inform and validate the platform’s information architecture.
Leadership
Took the lead on initial concept design to reimagine the directory experience with a focus on findability and usability.
Created detailed project documentation, including research summaries, design recommendations, and stakeholder handoff materials.
Developed a research roadmap aligned with agile sprints to ensure iterative feedback and smooth collaboration across the team.
Context
Sponsor: Highway
Timeline: 4 months
Team: 2 Lead UX Researchers, 3 UX Designers, 3 UX Researchers
Skills
Platform Audit, Stakeholder Interviews, Contextual Inquiries, Card Sorting, User Flows, Mental Model Diagrams, Usability Testing, Sketches, Wire-framing, Hi-fidelity prototyping, Storytelling, Documentation.
TL;DR
For this project, Highway asked us to address issues in their "Directory" section. The Directory contains carrier contact information and data points that verify contact reliability. However, this abundance of information overwhelms brokers.
Different types of brokers interact with this data differently—compliance leaders need to carefully review it to identify fraudulent carrier contacts, while carrier sales representatives need to quickly scan it to book carriers.
Our team's task was to simplify and streamline how brokers vet carriers within the directory.
Our hard work resonated with Highway's team - during one of our last meetings, our sponsor shared that they're already moving forward with implementing some of our recommendations
Our sponsors expressed strong satisfaction with our work:
"Great job here team, you all should be very proud of your efforts. I'm very impressed with the report and your suggested solutions to help fix some of the information overload and incongruity."
Re-designed version of the directory aligns better with both kinds of brokers— compliance leaders as well as carrier sales representatives.
Understanding Brokers and Their Workflows
Different types of brokers interact with this data differently—compliance leaders need to carefully review it to identify fraudulent carrier contacts, while carrier sales representatives need to quickly scan to book carriers.
Freight Broker
Carrier Company
Shipper
Full HD
SMART TV
Full HD
SMART TV
Full HD
SMART TV
(Highway Customer)
Compliance Broker
(Vets Thoroughly)
Sales Broker
(Vets Quickly)
Our new goal is to streamline the workflow to better serve the needs of both user groups, ensuring that the system provides the right level of detail for each role and simplifies the decision-making process for everyone.
Current Highway Directory
Here's What we had to Fix
01 Information Overload
The directory displayed an overwhelming amount of data with poor information hierarchy. We identified three main issues that contribute to brokers' cognitive overload:
Jump to solution
Cluttered Sub-Data Points
Current organization of risk indicators in Highway's directory lacks clear prioritization, forcing brokers to manually verify data points and potentially make incorrect assumptions due to inconsistent color indicators.
Looooong List Of Contacts
The current organization of risk indicators in Highway's directory lacks clear prioritization, forcing brokers to manually verify data points and potentially make incorrect assumptions due to inconsistent color indicators
Uncategorized Identifiers
The current organization of risk indicators in Highway's directory lacks clear prioritization, forcing brokers to manually verify data points and potentially make incorrect assumptions due to inconsistent color indicators
02 Complex Contact Findability
The directory lacks clear verification indicators and contains redundant contact entries across both the Highway-verified and general contacts sections. We identified two main issues:
Jump to solution
Missing Verification Indicator
Current organization of risk indicators in Highway's directory lacks clear prioritization, forcing brokers to manually verify data points and potentially make incorrect assumptions due to inconsistent color indicators.
Overlapping Contacts
Current organization of risk indicators in Highway's directory lacks clear prioritization, forcing brokers to manually verify data points and potentially make incorrect assumptions due to inconsistent color indicators.
03 Unclear System Logic
The platform's design contains several inconsistencies that create confusion. These inconsistencies made it hard for brokers to quickly understand and trust the information, which impacted their decision-making. We identified two main issues:
Jump to solution
Color and Terminology Mismatch
Current organization of risk indicators in Highway's directory lacks clear prioritization, forcing brokers to manually verify data points and potentially make incorrect assumptions due to inconsistent color indicators.
Misalignment Between Main Indicators and Driving Data Points
The current organization of risk indicators in Highway's directory lacks clear prioritization, forcing brokers to manually verify data points and potentially make incorrect assumptions due to inconsistent color indicators
Takeaways!
Don’t wait to become the domain expert!
It was my first time taking on a project from a completely unknown domain like freight industry. Initially, it felt overwhelming to learn everything and their vocab.
Take time to understand the domain, but don't wait for complete understanding—learning happens throughout the process.
Be ready to adapt!
We also learned to adapt with the timeline and availability of resources, as things don’t always go as planned and so we had to eliminate a few activities and cherry pick how we would gain more insights in a shorter time, it was all about strategizing our process.
Spend Time To Identify All Stakeholders
Through our contextual inquiries, we discovered that while we initially focused only on compliance leaders as our target audience (based on our sponsor meeting discussions), however, CSRs were actually the secondary users for the directory.
So, we shifted our focus to interviewing more CSRs in the later stages, however, would have benefited more from interviewing them from the onset; would have given us better comparison of their workflows for us to make clear distinctions.
Here’s what my team has to say about me…
“Your teammates greatly admire your leadership skills, knowledge sharing, and excellent communication within the team. They consistently highlight your ability to guide the group effectively while providing kind and constructive feedback that is never condescending. Many of your peers feel they have grown as designers and collaborators because of your insights and support, and they appreciate your approachable and fun demeanor.
Your work is praised for its high quality, and your willingness to help and re-explain concepts to others has left a strong, positive impression.”
~ Dr. Austin Toombs (Fall ‘24 HCI/d Studio Instructor)
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