CONSUMERS
- Missing deliveries
- Inconvenience of waiting at home for deliveries
- Worried about packages being stolen or damaged
DELIVERY SERVICES
- Huge (No.1) cost on redelivery logistics
- Damaging customer experience and brand value
Problem solving
As a startup at an early stage, we didn’t have product managers on the team. Both our technical lead and I wore the PM hat and defined product opportunities. We identified 2 main problems:
- How might we utilize cars as personal mobile lockers for consumers, so that they can have a peace of mind receiving their deliveries?
- How might we optimize logistics for delivery companies?
To explore optimal user experience, I storyboarded user journey as below.
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Design process
The main use case of consumer app is to let consumer view their delivery status; while the main use case of delivery specialist app is to let the user be able to find the vehicle, unlock it, deliver the package and lock the vehicle. It is complex to communicate the flow of delivery status change on both applications, because real-life delivery status might be different from what the user will see on the screen. In almost any scenarios, there might be errors and latency due to network connection and so on, and it will highly affect user experience and how to proceed on the backend. To understand technology feasibility and limitations, I translated the real-life scenarios into application work flow and organized workshops with development team to gather feedback.
Communicating with developers and discussing corner cases
Prototyping and user research
To understand our market opportunities, our business development specialist and I conducted a primary market research with a marketing agency. I came up with the simple demo to also showcase what the experience on the phone can be. We first did online focus group and diary study to understand the pain points of online shoppers and their thoughts about the concept. Below is some of the feedback we got from the research.
From the qualitative research, we understand that the concept does create convenience for the user, but also brings up concerns like privacy. Then we decided to proceed with online research, which samples 1000 people domestically, to understand business models, e.g. how much people would like to pay for the service. Based on the insights we got from both qualitative and quantitative research, I identified the use cases and came up with another version of design.
Main use cases
Solutions and tweaks to maximize user experience
And of course, like all the other new services introducing to the market, concerns will rise up. People care about safety and privacy to some degree, in the tradeoff with convenience. Beth S: “Someone else opens my car and I’m not there.” Zach J:“How do they know where my car is… Are they tracking the car?” To increase user’s trust on the service, I add a feature where the user is even able to track down when (accurate to seconds) the delivery person opened the trunk, locked it, and left.
Also to make sure we can get the accurate car location without tracking it, I add another option where the user can pinpoint car location (like Uber) if they want to. This function is in rescheduling or giving out more information on the delivery details page. The users are also encouraged to add comment or “hint” help the delivery person to find the car.
For future versions of Box2Go, the user should also be able to save edited delivery locations into his “address book”, and be able to update all deliveries on the same day with the same location. These are not necessary part of MVP for now.
Creating consumer-facing application visual identity from scratch
Animations of Delivery Service app
Learning and reflection
One thing I always know and always understand deeper is how important user research is. Creating something not in the market is always risky, so trying different approaches and testing out on real consumers to understand their threshold is extra beneficial. For the same reason, we are going to launch a pilot with some big car company and one of the biggest e-commerce partner to better understand our customers. I’m preparing end-to-end user touch points in this pilot, and I’m looking forward to learning more.