Driver Mode
Help Convoy carriers with load execution success through driving friendly guided workflow.
It's pretty challenge for carriers to execute a load and maintain high service quality while multitasking.
Being a carrier and hauling loads is very tough today. Think about how many things a carrier must deal with daily to run a business. Making phone calls, getting quotes, fixing truck problems, placing bids, etc. How are they supposed to remember individual load requirements and satisfy the service quality shipper needs with everything going on?
But what if Convoy guides carriers on successfully executing the load and removing all the execution hassles? What do those experiences look like?
My team got together to rethink the Convoy load execution experience - Driver Mode.
TL;DR
My role
From 2022-2023, I led the Convoy carrier experiences end to end, responsible for defining and realizing a vision for carrier load execution experiences. Drove product from problem discovery to launch plan. I worked with partners and stakeholders across multiple pods, drove product alignment, and got buy-in from leadership.
Problem
The volume of the truck market goes down, making it extremely difficult for Convoy to stay on the market and be competitive and appealing to both shippers and carriers. What can make Convoy stand up among competitors is its good service. The service provider is Convoy carriers. But carriers told us Convoy is challenging to work with due to high service quality requirements but less guidance. While multitasking, they need help to execute the load and remember all the load requirements.
Solution
Driver Mode - provide carriers with a guided workflow that offers the relevant information and actions at the right moment to help load execution at the highest service quality standard. Its unique task model could satisfy all the Convoy use cases and shipper execution requirements.
Before
After
Impact
Driver Mode concept is broken into 3 core milestones. The first two milestones were successfully launched with great service quality improvement.
+2.3%
On time rate
-3.77%
Trailer rejection rate
-18%
Load execution cost
Challenge
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Obtaining legal approval and coordinating logistics for a post-Covid ride-along study.
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Developing innovative design solutions within limited benchmarking possibilities.
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Ensuring stakeholder alignment to shape on-road experiences and set milestones.
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Designing a flexible framework to accommodate diverse carrier use cases and gain consensus.
Read the case study below
About Convoy carrier experiences
Convoy is the nation’s leading digital freight network, which moves millions of truckloads around the country through the connected network of carriers.
Carriers bid, book, and execute loads through the Convoy carrier app. Driver Mode was designed to improve the load execution.
Design process
The first step of the design process involved ride-along studies and existing experiences analysis. This helps us understand carrier execution flow and current tech landscapes and problems we have. With the set of problems to solve, I did benchmarking studies on products on the market to gain inspiration.
I conceptualized the solution, focusing on developing the UI framework and user flows to have material to engage with the engineering team to get estimate quotes and core stakeholders to get alignment. Then, I did iterative usability studies with carriers to refine the concept and its ease of use. Finally, I worked with the Brand team to iterate the design system to ensure it covers the driving-specific UI components.
I ran executive presentations with leadership to socialize the idea and gain more resources. With leadership support, I worked with PM to break the concept into 3 milestones.
Where everything starts
One of the goals earlier in 2023 was to improve the overall carrier service quality because service helps Convoy win more freight in this fluctuating market. One of the areas that heavily affects carrier service quality is the load execution (aka on-road) experiences. Our team hopes to iterate the carrier load execution experiences, which could increase the on-time rate, decrease the trailer rejection rate, and save more execution time for Convoy.
Driver Mode was the concept first being brought up, but people need to learn what it is and why carriers need it. That's the moment I was brought up to the team to help shape the future of the carrier load execution experiences - Driver Mode.
Understand the problem
We started the project by doing a 3-day ride-along study and mapping the existing carrier experiences journey. The goals are to understand carrier pain points and analyze the existing experience landscape.
Define design principles
By doing the ride-along study, I collected three top insights that helped shape this project's design principles.
Align on key problems to solve
One of the key outcomes of doing the study and journey map was the alignment of 3 pain points that we felt were the highest priority:
Carriers don’t know how to execute a load with the required service quality successfully
Carriers are frustrated with back-and-forth calls due to incorrect tracking and system fraud
Existing experiences have a lot of usability issues and are not driving-friendly
Concept
A unique status of the app is only utilized when carriers are executing on a load, which offers a guided workflow that helps carriers execute a load step by step.
Task list
One of the carrier’s pain points is that they don’t know the expected behavior before the load. So, providing a task list and prompting the right tasks at the right moment becomes critical. With a task list view, carriers see the expected behavior to execute the load successfully.
Guided execution flow
The load requirements coming from shippers are very diverse. Carriers don’t understand why shippers have these unique needs and how to accommodate them better so they won’t get rejected onsite. We need to provide carriers with a guided execution flow, and carriers don’t have to remember what to do at what time with shipper-required service quality.
Roll back progression
Today, carriers are very frustrated with back-and-forth calls with Convoy. Part of those calls are rolling back shipment progression. Currently, the progression was made by automation and has a lot of frauds, so enabling carriers to correct the wrong shipment progression will help Convoy have clean data and remove hassles for carriers.
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Tracking transparency
Carriers don’t know how and when Convoy is tracking them. It ends up getting a bunch of calls from Convoy to check their estimated arrival time and confirm if the driver will be late. In Driver Mode, transparency is key, enabling carriers to self-serve to report late or update their estimated arrival time.
Shipment progression
There isn’t a great execution experience without interaction with Convoy support agents. They handle most of all support topics as well as monitoring shipment progression.
Previously, it was challenging to paint a picture of load progression. I iterated the design to ensure agents have the right tools to support carriers when needed.
Gaining support
With this newly developed concept, we aren’t sure how carriers will feel about the overall concept. So we went to iterate the concept by running studies with carriers and reviewing those concepts with various stakeholders and industrial experts by doing executive presentations. The CTO and CEO bought in the concept as one of the most significant innovations for Convoy in 2023 since no other competitors have any similar experiences today.
Impact
Post iteration, I worked with the product team to break the vision into incremental milestones, including building the task model, collecting load requirements, solving overlapping load problems, etc. All the experiences have launched with positive service quality improvement and decreased the cost of on-road support. The implementation is still going on.
None of this would have been possible without all the incredible people I worked with. Shoutout to all the excellent teams at Convoy — including the Loadex eng and product team, Shipment success, Carrier marketplace, Operation, Brand team, and more.