HERE Supply Chain

I led a talented team of designers working on mobile and web apps for supply chain and last mile delivery, as they refined their positioning and go-to-market.

My role was to develop space and competency for design discovery – by partnering with product and research to improve processes, and facilitating workshops that framed complex journeys through a customer lens.

This was my first role as a people manager, with some hands-on work. My approach was to lead with empathy and transparency: helping the team connect with meaningful opportunities to grow themselves alongside the products they were working on.

UX Design Manager

Key contributions

  • Meaningful objectives, improved design critiques, 360 feedback and career progressionhelped to increase engagement scores across the board in employee feedback.

  • I helped introduce Jobs-to-Be-Done as a design team competency, together defining process, templates and coaching. Feature kickoff workshops helped align product teams on the origins, assumptions and appetite for key features before work began.

  • I ran desktop competitive research to refine the product value proposition. I facilitated workshops to collect feedback and refine the strategy for the Last Mile product.

  • I paired with solution architects and facilitated workshops to align platform and product teams on customer-first solutions for migrating products to the HERE platform.

Let’s bring the team together!

It was a time of change, remote working and belt-tightening. After onboarding a new designer to the team, I wanted to bolster collaboration and establish pathways for growth. Together we created a skills matrix that showed the capabilities of the team and where everyone wanted to develop further.

Meaningful objectives, improved design critiques and 360 feedback contributed to increased engagement scores for my team in employee feedback.

Improving design discovery

It’s sometimes easier for product teams to jump to solutions when describing features, instead of describing the value they should deliver to customers. Together with our research team, we established new processes to bolster the design discovery phase and reframe features from a user perspective.

  • We ran feature kickoff workshops with product and engineering leads, to understand the purpose, assumptions and ‘appetite’ for individual features. These helped to set the scene and to plan the work.

  • Together with our user research team, I co-led the introduction of Jobs to Be Done as a design competency to frame features in terms of user needs. These mapped nicely to journey maps for the bigger picture.

Journey mapping to make complex problems tangible

A large and complex piece of work was to migrate our supply chain products to the HERE Platform where, with the flexibility and tooling the platform provides, they could be applied to a broader spectrum of use cases. The migration would require changes both in the platform and in each product.

Bringing together knowledge from the platform and product teams, I facilitated workshops to align on which areas of the product would be offloaded to the platform and which would stay embedded in the product. We developed customer journeys for multiple customer roles and identified experience gaps that would form the basis for future work packages.

Bringing a user experience lens to complex and technical problems makes them tangible for the whole team. It moves conversations to a language everyone can understand, with which we can evaluate the tangible impact of decisions.

Journey maps should always start with a realistic goal. I’ve blurred content in these journeys since some content may be commercially sensitive.

HERE Last Mile

Delivery companies are working in an area of low margins, with poor driver retention, and a customer base that expects faster and higher levels of service. Delivery drivers are juggling ever more parcels amid a busy urban environment that they can’t control.

How might we streamline the delivery experience for drivers, and give dispatchers more visibility and control?

The driver app provided a familiar navigation experience along a tour that was optimised for all deliveries for the day. Typography was optimised for one-handed use while on-the-go.

The dispatcher app included areas for managing deliveries, depots, the fleet and drivers, anchored by a vertical navbar.

Dispatchers work under time-pressure to assign parcels to drivers and monitor deliveries, fielding customer enquiries throughout the day.

The app centered around a view to manage and monitor deliveries. The map adjusted to display an overview of all drivers or a single driver and their parcels for delivery. The app included areas for managing deliveries, depots, the fleet and drivers, that were anchored to a vertical navbar.

Parcels could be either automatically distributed among drivers, or individually assigned to each driver for more control. The app automatically routes that were optimised for each driver, which were delivered to the driver app.

Asset and Shipment tracking

Asset and shipment tracking are related but distinct use-cases. Both involve tracking the movement of many objects over time; zooming from a big picture view to analyze the movement of a single asset.

Patterns emerge that can help asset and supply chain managers make improvements across the board, such as knowing which shipping companies are delivering reliably on-time, or which worksites have valuable assets sitting idle.

When managing hundreds of assets and shipments at once, how might we direct managers to where their attention is needed, taking into account what is important to them?

Different visualisation methods and careful use of colour helped users to filter through vast amounts of information.

With hundreds of assets to track at once, the apps are designed to give users control over which lens they want to view it from. Whether they want to review individual shipments, assets, locations or suppliers, or to identify patterns for improvement over time.

Rules were a powerful tool that made the information across the app more relevant and personalised. With them, users could apply criteria that were important for each shipment or asset, and to set alerts when limits were exceeded – such as an increase in temperature, or a sudden movement that may damage goods in transit. The results changed how information was presented across dashboards and detail views throughout the app.

Data visualisation, maps, careful use of colour, filters and rules all helped users to track many objects and once and then dig deeper where they need to.