Rad Design

Private Network

 
 
 

The Risk Assessment Engine is a feature I designed for DAT One as a part of efforts to combat fraud. The Figma prototype below is a recreation and not a direct 1:1 to the final handoff.

 

Background / Industry

DAT (Dial-A-Truck) is the Craigslist of the freight industry focusing on long-haul trucking and independent contractors.

 

User Problem

Time to Book

We got reports from specifically our broker users (the ones who look for truck drivers to carry the load to its destination) that they were spending upwards of five hours a day trying to source reliable partners.

While our customers do have lists of their preferred partners they don’t have very many good solutions for saving or organizing them. We would go on site visits to various brokerages and see the actual, literal, sticky notes attached to monitors with truck driver names and phone numbers.

My UX Senses are tingling, there’s something we could do here to improve this situation.

 

Our Answer

How might we reduce the time to book?

Private Network. The idea was to provide an essentially free contact management platform to our users so that they could not only reduce time to book by having their list of contacts on the same platform, but also so we could gather more data about who works with who.

 

Research

I’m a nerd about research, if you want to read more information on our studies and initial findings I go into a bit more detail here.

  • DescriptionI joined this project after the initial release of this feature-set. There was no existing formal research, so we started from scratch. Our primary findings:

    The name was very poorly received. Both brokers and truck drivers were suspicious of the word “Private” and they don’t internally refer to their lists of contacts as their “Network”.

    The current state was pushed out very quickly and looked nothing like the rest of the product.

    There are fundamental roadblocks to making a feature like this work:

    Our users don’t trust us not to share the specifics of their contacts with others for a price

    Even though a good portion of our users didn’t have a solution to manage this particular problem they had a lot of inertia. Their requirements to use this feature were very high involving multiple features we weren’t expecting.

    The workflow was painful. For example it was actually easier to just delete your entire contact list and re-upload it than make changes to more than one contact at a time.

    DAT offers other services that are not integrated into Private Network but logically should be. Without those integrations duplicate workflows would be created. text goes here

 

Goals

The business provided us these goals based on the research:

  • Increase Private Network usage by at least 50% in 6 months

  • Bring the feature set in line with the design system

  • Prioritize connections to other features that were being promoted at the time (digital booking of loads for truck drivers)

The product manager was given leeway to accomplish these goals, whatever worked.

 

Ideation

Given we started this project with the goal of improving an underperforming product we were able to start with some basic information.

Persona

 

Flows

We did a lot of work mapping out user flows for various aspects of this feature set, but here’s the pre Private Network state and our happy path once all functionality was released.

Pre Private Network:

Private Network with all functionality enabled:

 

Design

This is a recreation of where we landed. This version was updated to be in our design language and matched the concurrently developed company search patterns.

 

Testing

We ran a series of usability tests on Private Network and the feedback was generally consistent. Primarily they need these features to more than match their current solution and Private Network does not do that.

“Look, all of this is fine. It’s great, I’m sure it works fine. It doesn’t really matter though when [COMPETITOR] does this and provides access to [PROPRIETARY]. If you can get all of this in one place then we’ll talk.” - A research participant in a usability study testing this UX.

 

Next Steps

These were the recommendations the research team and I provided to take this feature-set to the next level:

  • More interconnections are required. The company also has offerings for onboarding new partners and monitoring existing ones. Combining all this functionality together would make for a powerful value-add.

  • The name needs to change, no one gets it.

  • The contact list needs to be able to me managed and filtered dynamically. For example if a company fails a safety inspection they should be temporarily removed from your list until their record checks out again.