New Platform Redesign >
Case Study
Manager, User Experience 2008-2009
Since 1998, Intermodal Transportation Systems has been regarded as a pioneer in delivering data-enabled equipment management and tracking services to over 7,000 ocean container transportation companies around the world.
Collecting large amount of data from the community, their Hub captures over 50,000 gate moves, equipment bookings and exchanges, work orders, rail bills, and track and trace transactions every day.
1. Overview
When I joined, Intermodal Transportation Systems was running various applications on multiple Hubs with duplicate data and functionalities. My role was to help in the creation of a single platform.
Challenges:
– Design a fully integrated platform for all their services.
– Enhance modularity to optimize resources and accelerate development.
– Identify reusable patterns to streamline development time.
– Re-design services’ workflow to improve users’ experience without breaking core business logic that supported EDI communications.
– Provide design guidelines to assist software engineers’ and QA team’s iterative process.
– Unify and consolidate brand recognition across services.
2. Actions
As a “UX team of One” I worked with chief architect and product managers to understand and develop background knowledge to better address the design challenge.
Steps:
– Reviewed PRDs, functional specifications, and modeling diagrams to understand constraints and requirements.
– Conducted field-studies, interviews, and survey to better understand and learn about users’ activities, needs, and point of views—created personas.
– Acted in concert with marketing team to integrate brand strategy.
– Worked with Chief Architect to bring my skills and sensitivities to the information architecture and define how information was to be retrieved from a top-down approach.
– Familiarized with company’s systems by evaluating working products.
– Worked with product managers to create storyboards.
– Created key wireframes to better communicate how to perform and complete specific tasks.
– Discussed with engineers technical constraints and opportunities, as well as the feasibility of proposed design solutions.
3. Results
– Presented a flexible framework that successfully met system requirements, business’ and users’ needs.
– Identified reusable patterns that reduced development time by 50%.
– Improved brand recognition by consolidating and unifying brand image across platforms.
– Perfected applications workflow that made them more intuitive and reduced training time.
– Set clear design guidelines that synchronized the design and development processes.
UNDERSTANDING
The space and the products:
