Key initiatives
- Increase dispatcher satisfaction
- Reduce operating costs by $100k per month
- Unlock volume without having to scale staff significantly
Often times tools that seem broken or poorly designed actually worked well at a time and place and circumstances simply shifted underneath their feet which exposed cracks that were not considered, because they simply weren't a consideration at the time.
This was the case for the dispatch and planning tool. It worked well for a time, but as the business grew, changed, pivoted over time the product needed to catch up. As a bonus the design team had been introducing new patterns across the org and the dispatch product was ready to start leveraging these to help achieve its goals.
User testing, performance metrics and usability metrics were gathered to understand where users were feeling pain, whether real or perceived. Where time, whether through duplicate work, manual intervention, or other ineffeciances, could be found and how could that be translated into money saved.
When we look at user satisfaction, on the surface it's easy to categorize it as a usability or accessibility improvement where maybe money can be saved from time saved with better UX. When we dig deeper we understood that satisfaction greatly impacted cost, not necessarily because the UX was poor but that the perception of the output was poor, for example, misplaced issues with routing, assignment, etc. This poor perception led to duplicate work, or net-negative changes to system-generated planning.
The goal was to improve how system-generated content was displayed, and surface the impact of changes, whether they be net-negative or net-positive.
A major part of this redesign was a 4-day design sprint. Pulling in stakeholders from across the org, ops leaders, business leaders, sales, etc. We levereged their knowledge to understand a broader vision for the product as part of the larger business and how the product could enable those business goals.
As a design team, we worked closely with product managers, engineers and stakeholders to build a design vision, handoff that vision and then continue to evangalize and protect it. We work closely with engineering to understand constraints and come up with solutions alongside them rather than be dictated by them. As a large undertaking this project was broken into many phases with very targeted product and business goals tied to each release, this allows us to constantly iterate on the solution and not be capture by our first idea.
