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Roadwe

Making transport industry process easy

About

RoadWe is a unique logistics management Android and web-based application that aims to digitize the creation and sharing of transport bilty and invoices. I landed up on this startup’s project during my employment at Sampark Infoways. The is my longest project so far and provided me with great industry knowledge.

Web & Mobile Application

Startup project

Sampark InfowaysFeb 2020 - Feb 2021

My roles and responsibility

Project lead, UX & Visual Designer

My responsibilities in Roadwe project as a project head were to plan and execute the project. Client briefing, day to day reporting & track, and team management were also part of the job. As a UX designer, counducting user research, market analysis, incorporating UI trends and working on user feedback were also my resposibilities.

The Challenge

Transportation industry is one of the very unorganised models of business in India. Each transaction requires a heavy amount of paperwork at multiple stages. Due to this, stakeholders face issues in maintaining and sharing the documents among other stakeholders.

The need of the hour is to create an easy, secure & accessible solution to digitalize the entire process of Documentation(Bilty, Invoice & Ledger) and sharing among stakeholders.

Client Briefing

The client was a non-technical guy from the Transportation Industry itself, but was such a visionary to come up with an idea like that. My boss and I were really amazed with the idea and were very excited to work on it. After a few meetings we were onboard and we kick started the work in March 2020. But then happened the mightiest of all, the historical Janta Curfew. So we continued the work in online mode.

Initial Concept

As it was a startup idea, the client had already conceptualised the product and had an almost clear vision for it. The client had created the app screens on the PowerPoint which he shared during the client briefing for us to understand better.

As I knew nothing about the respective industry, this briefing and these concept screens helped me a lot understanding the depth of the problem and the limitations with the industry. This knowledge supported to my secondary research.

Context Inquiry

Lots of field, Loads of papers

For each shipment there is at least 1 bilty, 1 load advice and 1 invoice which is filed and has to be shared with other participants in the process in various phases. If the shipments have a checkpoint then respectively the number of documents increases, resulting in a pile of documents for one shipment. Usually there are 10-20 trucks with 2-5 checkpoints for one shipment.

Daily life of transporters

The people in the industry are from various backgrounds and are from various levels. From the uneducated to highly educated, all kinds of people have to carry out similar tasks. As being a not defined industry approaching ‘one fits for all’ can be really problematic. Inclusivity is crucial in this case.

User research & analysis

Key Personas

There are 3 unique categories in the transport industry which are out target user base. All three can be described as our primary users. These are the keys involving people in each transaction process who participate in the process in various levels and have different characteristics. So making all three feel inclusive was a very important task.

User stories

The goals of users can be summarized into the user stories to understand clearly the pain points and goals of the users.

Designing the user experince

Well, as it happened, the whole design section I can divide in 3 parts so that we can discuss it clearly. Let’s begin..!

Phase 1 : Initial design and app build

Post the user research and analsis, we focused on major pain point and listed out the features with utmost priority. Then, I shifted to the wireframing of web app for clearer understanding of data flow and features.

Wireframes for web app:

Next up, I decided the stages of data flow on the basis of the user-scenarios created earlier. This helped me recheck the feature map one more time before design to make sure that the design is executed with a more planned approach.

First phase of design

35+

Android app screen

Post the approval of wireframe the work on back-end development started and I was directed to jump to the mobile app interface directly. I designed the ap completely based on secondary research and targeted user base. Due to lock down, we were running behind the schedule so we decided to launch the app without usability testing.

Sign up

Enter OTP

Fill details

Select user type

Side navigation

Bilty listing

Invoice listing

Consultant list

And we launched the app as it was and I was working parallel for web app interface design. Till the time the web-app developed, we already had the app in the Google Play Store and started receiving reviews through mails, personal connections and our team also.

Phase 2 : Web app and user feedback

We collected the reviews and took into our account. I analyzed the issues with usability and in the second phase we tried to optimize it. But due to the focus on design and development of web-app, only the interface level things were being modified in the app with frequent updates to our user.

User feedback & usability changes

Its tough to change porfile picture

The option to update profile picture/logo is deep into profile edit section which was tough for many to find out

Nav bar icons are thin and small

Giving them respective color code, making the icon thick and enlarging the text resolved this issues.

Button hides stuff beneath it.

The create button in both Bilty and invoice hides some details of the card layout. So turning it into a movable button is how we did it.

Web app user interface

Combining the feedback that we received from users and features that were still to be added, we made the web-app better and more useful. Our plan was to implement new features in the web app and test it then change on the app.

30+

Unique web app pages created

Along with multiple states, and micro-interactions

Phase 3 : Final app changes and interface redesign

After getting positive responses on the features of the web app, we accommodated the changes and features in the mobile app interface as well. So this was the following design product

50+

Unique android app screens created

Along with multiple states, and micro-interactions

Key features

1. Multi user accounts

2. Vehicle Details Search

3. Driving Lience Search

4. In-app receiver sign

5. Automated system for billing transit and billed notification

6. In-app book keeping for all the transactions.

7. download in the industry standard format and share

8. integrate all the related documents for one transaction into one invoice

The result

5,000+

User accounts were created by Feb 2021 and still counting…!

The app is still evolving on the process and helping tons of people in industry. Saving a lot of paperwork and hence paper also.

My learnings

Inclusivity in design

As the primary user base is both highly-educated and very low educated, the app was made compatible with local language support. I understood how easily one can miss out on using a software or app just because of a very small and easily solvable problem. Keeping the consideration of inclusivity all along since the beginning helped me a lot in designing better for our users.

Design for both business and users

Sometimes we as a service provider need to take some ‘out of the process’ steps to ensure that the both user and company benefit from the project. There is just never a perfect and definite path, improvise while you lack and learn from it.

You will never know if its a good design, only know when its bad

I figured a design can not be bad until it's solving the problem it was created for. You can not realise the goodness of it because it's not overwhelming in any aspects. But when it doesn't work, you immediately know.