Work
About
Introduction
Process
Identifying Opportunities
Defining Requirements
Ideation + Prototyping
Handoff + Support
Takeaways
LinkedIn
Résumé

Design+Code by Adeeb '22

Between Aug’ 20 - Aug ‘21, I had the opportunity to collaborate with the UpStrategy Lab↗ team as a digital product designer.

During this time, I contributed to the design of two digital products: Cogoport↗ and MuchSkills↗

Below is a compilation of all the work I was able to do on Cogoport, which is a platform designed for exporters and importers to easily connect with logistics providers (freight forwarders, transporters, customs house agents, etc.) and collaborate with them to conduct their international trade seamlessly.
Roles Design Strategy, Service Design, UX/UI Design
Duration Aug '20 - Jan '21
Tools Figma, Principle

Screens from the Cogoport webapp on mobile

Cogoport

The Cogoport platform is designed for exporters and importers to easily connect with logistics providers (shipping liners, freight forwarders, transporters, customs house agents, etc.) and collaborate with them to conduct their international trade seamlessly.

During the time I worked on Cogoport, the team had more than 100 people, and the platform attracted ~1000 visitors daily.
Having recently secured Series B funding, the company was in growth mode -- looking to improve the overall customer experience of its digital platform, and expand its user base across the globe.

Process

My focus during my time collaborating with the Cogoport team was to identify opportunities for growth and help the in-house development team implement these ideas.

My journey can be summarized as a 4-step process:

Identifying Opportunities

I began by spending some time understanding the entire shipment planning process. Owing to its inherent complexity, this meant multiple conversations/workshops with the teams that represented the two broad stakeholder groups: the people who wish to avail shipping services (The Shippers), and the people who supply these services (The Suppliers).
This exercise highlighted the multiple touchpoints in these journeys that needed to either be redesigned, or designed for the first time -- both for the shippers as well as for the suppliers.

I chose to focus on the suppliers and was able to connect with some of the ones that used the platform to understand their needs and goals with respect to what the platform had to offer, and learned that:

1

Most suppliers are skeptical of the onboarding process because it is “too time consuming”.

2

Most suppliers find it difficult to maintain their rates on the platform, referring to the process as “cumbersome” and “confusing”.

3

Most suppliers find it difficult to monitor their ongoing shipments on the platform, citing “a lack of transparency”.

These concerns made it clear why even though the platform had over 100 registered suppliers, all of them were assigned a team member to run their accounts on their behalf.
Design Opportunity
How might we improve the overall platform experience for suppliers?

Defining Design Requirements

The next step was to work with members on the supplier team as well as on the development team and identify ways in which we could improve the Cogoport platform for all of the registered suppliers that were feasible and realistically implementable.

In collaboration with the Product Manager for the Supplier Portal, I created a design requirement document that was drafted to ensure teamwide alignment. The outline of this document was:

1. Overview
2. Target Users
3. Core User Stories
4. User Needs
5. Design Goals
6. Timelines

Ideating & Prototyping

One of the challenges of working on this project was that we were operating under quick timelines - we had to move fast and move smart.

In order to do that, ideation on the defined requirements was done in high fidelity to fast track decisions.

This approach worked well in this specific context because everyone was more or less aligned in terms of functionality. It also gave me the opportunity to think about the product experience visually, and not just conceptually.

How might suppliers manage their shipping rates more effectively?

For example, one of the features we decided to design was the Rate Management Tool -- a complex shipping rates and container inventory management system.

Shipping rates issued by liners are extremely complex and inconsistent - there are no unified standards in the industry. Since most suppliers procure rates from multiple liners, the differing formats makes further freight rate analysis time-consuming and error-prone.
Rate Sheet variance
We recognized an opportunity here to provide a solution to suppliers to manage all of their rates in one central location, instead of maintaining trails of emails, excel documents and WhatsApp messages.

Early concepts for the Rate Management tool

Rapid high fidelity ideation help the team evaluate the Rate Management feature from an experience point of view, and the finalised design incorporated all the things that worked:

How might suppliers manage their bookings?

Accepting and managing bookings is similarly complicated: multiple parties need to perform multiple time bound tasks.

For the Booking Management Tool, I worked with the booking management team to develop job stories to figure out all the tasks that need to be completed by a supplier;
In order to address the constant back and forth inherent to the booking management process, I created a prototype to evaluate a timeline based concept:

Final designs for the Booking Management tool

Using this approach of rapid ideation and prototyping, we were able to design and the following features:
Supplier Onboarding The supplier onboarding flow is designed to incorporate the KYC component so that the platform is able to aggregate relevant enquiries for the supplier as soon as they are verified.
Rate Management Suppliers are used to circulating shipping rates to prospective shippers in the form of spreadsheets. At Cogoport, we had to make sure our Rate Management feature is as easy as maintaining a spreadsheet.
Enquiry Management A lot of a supplier’s business comes from enquiries generated by shippers. On the Cogoport platform, these enquiries are aggregated by port pairs so suppliers are able to procure bulk rates from shipping lines to meet the demand.
Win a booking “Winning” a booking is an alternative way for suppliers to respond to enquiries. This feature does not aggregate demand, but instead shows each enquiry as a singular business opportunity.
Port Management Suppliers conduct their business from a set of “port pairs” for which they have the relevant documentation and licenses for. On the Cogoport platform, they are able to manage these port pairs, and maintain all the rates associated with them.
Booking Management Once a booking is placed on the Cogoport platform, all of the tasks and updates are managed using the booking timeline. This timeline is accessible by all of the people responsible for the different tasks that are to be completed over the course of the shipment and delivery.
Cancellation Management The cancellation flow is designed to be as transparent as possible, so that both the shipper as well as the supplier are able to make the necessary arrangements.

Developer Handoff

To ensure smooth handoff to developers, each design was broken down into components, and each component was detailed in terms of states and behaviours.
We maintained a growing atomic repository of all the unique elements that were used while creating each of the designs that were finalised;
To communicate the interactions/transitions/states that were required, clickable prototypes accompanied each unique feature and the developers were given a complete walkthrough before the sprint began.

Developer Support

During the development process, features were regularly tested and bugs were catalogued to ensure that they get resolved. We had a dedicated page on the org Notion that had all of these items listed out, and my responsibility here was to ensure that the development team had everything they needed to resolve bugs/errors.
Because I have some experience working with HTML/CSS, I was not only able to understand more clearly why some elements were behaving differently on web browsers, but also jump into the source code and suggest different ways to handle the stylesheets to resolve those issues.

For instance, some of my bug reports would look like this:

Takeaways

My biggest learning from my time collaborating with the team at Cogoport was that there is a fine line between simplifying a complex process, and undermining it altogether.

The logistics ecosystem is very cumbersome, and our focus was to make all of it easy to comprehend. We did not want to pretend as if we could make the steps disappear, because we couldn’t. All of the features I was able to work on were tested with existing users of the platform, and our success metrics all revolved around how comfortable our users felt while using our platform to perform complex tasks.