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Logistics Technology
I had the opportunity to participate in this groundbreaking project - first of it's kind in Latin America. Loggi connects customers and corporate clients with couriers to solve the problem of same-day, last-mile delivery.
Design Lead - UX Research - Product Design - Branding
Context
Loggi is a digital logistics services platform focused on last-mile logistics.
Created in Sao Paulo, Brazil - Loggi was born from the observation of the “motoboys”, how the motorcycle couriers are called over there. Loggi is the digital answer to a market that was, until then, 100% offline.
Challenge
By 2013, the service was still done the old way - completely analogical process - using basically phone calls and paper Service Orders so the couriers could know what to do. We realized that this market was still based on rules from the ’70s and in desperate need of modernization. We also knew from data that there were about 500 thousands of motoboys in Sao Paulo.
So how could we use this amazing offer of transportation of goods to help optimize the ever-growing
e-commerce demands in a country that is constantly struggling with infrastructure and logistics gaps?
Research
We gathered as much information about the market as we possibly could. We knew that there were laws and official directives from the government to try and organize this “class” of workers. From this, we found that, despite the laws, from the 500 thousand motoboys working every day in the streets of Sao Paulo, about only 5% of them were authorized to work as motorcycle couriers and had proper regular jobs. This was a big eye-opener to us since we wanted to create a reliable safe service for both the courier and the clients.
CLIENTS
From Clients, we found that there was a big insatisfaction with the motoboys services and the companies providing the service. Prices were changing all the time, rules were changing all the time, they found people rude, aggressive and not trustworthy. I’ve personally done several interviews with individual and corporate clients from the most various segments, from law firms to small e-commerce sites and big e-commerce companies to big multinational fortune 500 companies. I spent some time immersed in companies that had a big number of hired motoboys that would run up and down the city the whole day taking documents and bringing back small packages. In small companies, we realized that there were several different forms of hiring and charging for the service - monthly, weekly, hourly, 2 hours, by delivery, by addresses visited, by period, by area so on and so forth...
CLIENT EMPATHY MAP
DRIVERS
From Drivers, we found from interviews that they usually worked for an intermediary, that collected the phone calls from clients and distributed them amongst the drivers, sometimes asking them who would do it for the least amount of money!
I’ve also done guerilla interviews on the streets to really get the grasp of what it meant to be all day in the street in a crazy setting like the hot, noisy, polluted, chaotic and sometimes dangerous city of Sao Paulo. In this service safari process, my routine consisted of going to the streets every day and really feeling in my skin what the motoboy’s life was all about.
I wanted to understand how they were using the cell phone - that is alone responsible for being the greatest catalyst of this market change - how they were receiving the service orders, how they did when there was a change in the order or if there was a problem in delivery for example. How they had to park the motorcycle, go into the office building, register (in Brazil you have to register to go up, for safety reasons), go up and sometimes or many times waiting for a long time until the person they had to interact with shows up! I was amazed by how much time they lost on that!
DRIVER EMPATHY MAP
Personas
We realized that our main challenge was to create a marketplace that incorporated and the struggles from both sides of the spectrum - clients and drivers - from many different backgrounds.
From the Client's side, we mapped the main types of users, for macro analysis. Later we mapped out the personas within the businesses like the secretary, the payroll person, purchasing, etc...
From this study, we also concluded that we couldn’t serve the big players, but we knew that once we build critical mass, that was our main goal. We also didn’t want to have to invest in trunks and training, so we chose to begin with just a few.
From the Driver's Side, we mapped out these types of users:
Interlaced User Journeys
Considering the marketplace model, we needed to understand the pains from both sides so we could build a product that would be effective and successful for both sides of the delivery process.
Using the created empathy maps to punctuate these issues and use them to create a unified user journey where Clients and Drivers had complete awareness of the steps they were at.
Here we created a CSD Matrix board so we could list all the things we were sure off from research.
From there we were able to determine the macro functionalities we needed to create.
Prototype/MVP
With all the information in hand, we went straight for an MVP based on a prototype we created - we needed to check the synchronicity, the maps function, the notifications and much more.
We also needed to understand how the Drivers would interact with the app “on the run”.
Major Findings
There were many interesting findings during this phase, like creating a UX that would not permit the driver to make mistakes, like pressing the wrong button by accident. The solution was creating a Press & Hold button for both acceptance and denial actions.
We also needed to add a Visual + Sound Notification for the Driver’s app since depending on the situation, the user was unable to get the message.
Regarding Notifications, we found that clients liked them, but found them annoying after a while, so we created a “Follow Your Delivery” tab that allowed clients to visualize the delivery status whenever they wanted and they had an opt-in to receive notifications by email or SMS if they wanted.
Soon, clients were demanding comprobation about the delivery. Questions like “who did you speak there?” or “who received the parcel?” came up all the time. We started collecting the name and signature of the person at the receiving end, a feature we called Digital Protocol and that feature was very popular. Soon it started to differentiate our couriers from the rest - like a trademark.
Final Designs
Loggi For E-Commerces
After only 2 years after our first test ride, we had enough drivers to do an enormous number of deliveries a day. For that, we created Loggi Pro, a platform that enables e-commerces to do a bulk last-mile delivery using the motoboys fleet.
Functionalities like batch delivery details upload, product return, different payment accounts, batch product loading were developed in order to optimize the experience on the client-side.
Today Loggi is one of the main options for last-mile logistics in Brazil, performing millions of deliveries weekly.
Loggi For Apple Watch
One of the last projects I participated at Loggi was to create a smartwatch version for the delivery tracking for clients.
