Parker Moore Design
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Case Study: Haven Messaging & Notifications

Haven customers are high-volume shippers: commodities traders, food producers, and some CPG companies. Their logistics business is complex. Shipments have many dependent stages in their lifecycle (quoting, documentation, tracking, invoicing). Collaboration is required across large, distributed teams and external partners for shipments to progress. Individual team members only need to be involved at particular stages relevant to their function (trader, ops, finance, etc).

 

The Problem

Traditionally, shipment management is driven by spreadsheets and emails. Collaboration takes the form of multiple heavily-nested email threads for multiple simultaneous shipments. Information, documents, and data is scattered – creating limited visibility and increased risk in an audit. Operational efficiency is negatively impacted by communication lags and missed tasks. As a result, the average shipment can take ~6 hours to complete.

Haven's collaboration and workgroups solutions helped customers move much of their document and task related communication from email to the platform. But other critical shipment communications remained in email. Additionally, Haven shipment updates and required action emails did little to reduce their overall email volume compared to life before Haven.

 
 

ROLE

Director of Product Design

Lead IC Product Designer

Duration

~1.5 months in design

~2 months in development

Team

VP of Product

Sr Product Designer (UX)

Product Manager

 
 

Hypothesis

Haven customers are working in the platform daily on multiple shipments - quoting, booking, managing documents, tracking, etc. An in-app messaging solution may dramatically reduce their dependence on email, consolidate all their shipment data in one source, and enable their team to complete shipments more efficiently.

How might we

  • Focus team communication around roles – only see and do what is required

  • Capture all communication for individual shipments, tie it to all shipment data

  • Increase collaboration to speed up resolution, approvals, and shipment completion

  • Increase customer expansion and partner engagement

Exploration

Reviewing real-time messaging standards like Slack, FB Messenger, WeChat, as well as email/inbox (eg: Gmail). This was a large scope project that required an mvp solution. As such, we favored proven UX patterns over novel concepts. My Sr Product Designer (UX) and I each took a concept direction and designed high-level wireframes to vet the approaches with the team.

Two broad approaches were considered:

  1. All-shipment inbox - Filtered and linked to shipment-level actions. Since our customers are used to email, why not provide a similar experience. One that keeps data in-Haven associated with shipments.

  2. Real-time shipment-level messaging - A message app embedded on each shipment, to facilitate collaboration for that particular shipment's team.

 
 

Solution

After vetting the approaches internally and with some select customer advocates, option 2 was selected for design. We also decided to reinforce app use by including an action-driven notifications system for tasks, messages, and updates. From there, I served as Lead IC Product Designer on the rest of the project, designing all interaction flows and UI.

 
 

Post-launch: Shipment exceptions & changes

Customers routinely need to make edits to their shipments. These can include changing the quantity or type of equipment, splitting shipments, and changing the voyage information. This was handled in the platform through our Help desk, and required manual intervention from Haven ops to manage the change request with the carrier.

How might we

  • Allow the customer to communicate direct with the carrier on shipment change requests

  • Provide an easy way to track progress & resolution on change requests

Solution

Add change request options to shipments. Provide a self-guided flow for customers to make change requests. Leverage shipment-level messaging to create a ticketing system for customers direct communication with the carrier. I served as the sole Lead IC Product Designer on the project, mapping out all interaction flows and designing the UI.

 
 

Results

Two of our core, distributed customers have onboarded additional origin office teams and external partners. Both are using Haven Messaging instead of email to facilitate the majority of their shipment communication.

For customers using Haven, the time to process a shipment has dropped from ~6 hours (before Haven) to 13 minutes on average. Haven Messaging has contributed to this overall savings.

Future improvements

  • Continue to refine notifications and digest email logic to further reduce email

  • Email reply to message notifications

  • Make it easier for non-haven customers to participate: no login necessary to review, upload, view & approve

  • Mobile enhancements and a standalone app