Logixboard is a B2B(2B) SAAS product that allows Freight Forwarders to give their customers full visibility into the complete A to B of their shipments. That's a lot of letters to say that we created a product that helps drag the supply chain industry, a notoriously old-school space, into the 21st century. To add to that, Logixboard has a lot of design needs. We built a team while kicking off a new design system, all while adding brand new features and functionality that our users were craving. Our long term goal is to continue to be the leader in this space as competitors sprout up to contest that.
Under our team, Action & Engagement, we were in charge of a number of aspects that spanned the entire application ecosphere. This was challenging in a number of ways but it also meant we needed to be explicitly communicative with other teams in a cross-collaborative way to ensure that patterns and expectations were in line.
Exceptions were under the purview of my team, Action & Engagement and represent an interesting intersection of our users. For Shippers, exceptions are points within the process that calls out attention and flags things that may have gone wrong. It's a potential inflection point that may require them to contact their Freight Forwarder. On the other hand, Freight Forwarders can offload some of their process to exceptions so they don't have to actively monitor some aspects of a shipment. Buuuut they can also potentially make the FF look bad by highlighting aspects of a shipment that have gone "wrong".
A logistics exception is a catch-all term for anything that might go wrong in the logistics process, whether a staffing shortage, a delay, or the unpredictable consequences of a global supply chain. Exceptions are an inevitable side effect of the industry.
Based on customer feedback and industry standards we knew exceptions would be a large underpinning of our product so we created a framework (from both an engineering and a content standpoint) that would allow us to add new exceptions and feed them into the various aspects of a shipment.
The first step for the app was to create the initial exceptions panel that lived within a particular shipment's Overview page. This was the "home base" for any shipments and was where all the details related to a shipment lived. The next step we mapped out was including exceptions within our "Shipment Explorer" which is the main hub of a user's total shipments.
While the Shipments Explorer is useful and one of the most popular destinations within the app, we knew we also needed to add exceptions to the Dashboard. We had scoped out a multi-step plan that would allow us to integrate exceptions in a progressively more comprehensive way.
While we started on the shipment step of the logistics process (the largest aspect) our foundation of exceptions allowed for the idea of raising a flag during other steps as well. We added exceptions to the Bookings step to alert our users of important dates that were coming up or when rates have expired.
Throughout the exceptions work I had many, many conversations with Freight Forwarders (Shippers were harder to get interviews with). After our MVP launched we heard feedback through our CSM channels and reached out to people to get an understanding of how our product was being used.
One thing we heard was that certain exception types had a tendency to bloat the overall number. We revisited the way we grouped exceptions to consolidate similar types and give a more accurate portrayal of actionable exceptions. This work really helped to bring the overall number of exceptions down.
Some of the very first feedback we heard was about the ambiguity that the MVP version of exceptions produced. It was always in the plan to create a place within the dashboard to give better insight into exceptions and allow our users to understand the landscape of the issued involved with their shipments. The primary goal was to categorize and prioritize exceptions so that our users could really focus on what was important to them at any given moment within the lifecycle of a shipment.
We had a lot of plans for the dashboard to update its usefulness and allow it to really give users insights into their business as logistics were concerned. Previously we had tinkered with the Inbox, which was a single module on the dashboard. With the exceptions updates that included creating categories of exceptions, we had our first chance to shake things up on the dashboard. I created a survey we sent out to gauge how our users thought about the different aspects of the dashboard and what they expected from an ideal version. This helped to prioritize current modules and shape our roadmap for upcoming discovery work.
Tackling the In App Communication within Logixboard involved an iterative process that would benefit the discoverability aspect of it and add numerous features we knew would help to facilitate the flow of communication between our Freight Forwarders and their Shipping customers.
The very first step was moving the IAC prompt from the bottom right corner of the screen up into the title area. The button was being confused for a marketing FAB that is commonly seen on many sites. This was the first step in a progressively rolled out plan to improve many aspects of our communication platform.
Each of the different types of entities (shipments, orders, bookings) within Logixboard had their own, siloed IAC experience. Through our work, we allowed for each of these to seamlessly move between each other from a backend perspective, without duplication or confusion for the user. This required many conversations with engineering to ensure that when entities were coupled or uncoupled, the user experience was smooth and informative. Our users just wanted it to work.
The IAC work that we were undertaking had a clear North Star experience that I envisioned for the platform. Instead of siloed messages within different entities, we would create a Unified Message Center that would house the different aspects of the Action & Engagement environment (see chart at top of page). The benefits of this move were many.
The image on the right is the notifications settings within the app. We knew we had to reduce the noise produced by the sheer number of notification types that wasn't getting smaller, but growing by the project. One of the major release valves for this would be our Unified Message Center. It would be the place our users went to get In App Communication, Notifications, Notes and potentially other important forms of outreach.
One of the oldest pieces of feedback within the Logixboard archives was the inclusion of Shipment Notes. This form of communication usually originates with the operators from a Freight Forwarders team and is a way to keep their shipping customers informed during the lifecycle of a shipment. One of the things I constantly reminded myself and the team is that Logixboard is, perhaps most importantly, a communication tool for our customers. It's a customer service tool that offloads many of the emails and phone calls a typical LSP would receive. Having Notes available (pulled in from CargoWise) allowed for a level of explanation and CYA for our customers. This relatively straight forward implementation was hailed as a huge success for our team.
