Overview
Hastings Deering is Australia’s largest Caterpillar dealership supplying Caterpillar equipment (big yellow earth moving machines) to the construction and mining industries throughout Queensland and the Northern Territory.
Their major sources of revenue comes from after market parts & services.
My Role
I led the end-to-end design while part of a cross-functional agile team (Product owner, technical lead, business analyst, developers & QA):
- User research: I planned and conducted research with customers and business stakeholders.
- Lead UX/UI design.
- Facilitated workshops with team and business stakeholders.
- Continuous iterative improvements through feedback analysis.
Deliverables
- User research: Insights & recommendations report
- Facilitated workshops with team & business stakeholders.
- Design artefacts: Miro – Journey maps, user-flows, wireframes, Figma – prototypes, production ready UI designs.
Product Release
The Problem
Customers found the existing online order tracking tool (version 1.0 below) too vague and unreliable, which leads to confusion, frustration, and a lack of trust in the delivery process.
Users are unable to get clear, real-time updates about their order’s status, resulting in an increased number of support phone calls and a negative feedback via online feedback form.
Tracking tool version 1.0
User Research
Methodologies used
- 1 on 1 interviews (customers & business SMEs)
- In-app surveys
- Customer support phone data
- Service safaris
I planned and conducted a series of interviews with a diverse range Hastings Deering customers to get a deeper understanding of the challenges they have running their business and what impact a lack of visibility on parts availability has on them.
Customer breakdown:
- Owner operator – 1 or 2 machines
- Small construction – 10 to 15 machines
- Large civil construction – 15 to 150+ machines
- Mining – 150+ machines
This combined with feedback from customer support teams and in-app feedback widgets gave me the following.
Research findings
- Lack of visibility on backorder parts caused maintenance scheduling issues and impacted income for customers.
- Incremental parts order fulfillment, due to parts availability, required frustrated customers to make multiple trips to the parts centre.
- Regional customers had to travel multiple hours to get to the parts centre only to be told not all parts are ready.
- Order status labels were too vague and misleading. “this tells me nothing”
- Customers wanted to know where a part was coming from so they could better plan their time and expectations.
- Large volume customers found it difficult to get an holistic view of all their parts availability.
Recommendations
- Allow customer to quickly and easily get backorder details.
- Show parts in a timeline of availability so they can decide/plan their time.
- Show customers what city/country backordered parts are coming from.
- Create more informative sales order status labels.
- Send customers order real-time status updates via notifications.
Design
User-flow
I started out by mapping the customer flow from buying a part through to accessing the app and tracking the status of their parts order.
Considerations were given as to whether they did or did not have an HD360 account.
Next I wanted to map out the flow that incorporates the business flow from the warehouse, considerations were given for what happens when a part is put on back order, a major pain point for customers.
Wireframes
Low fidelity wireframes were created to work through the flow and to validate with customers and stakeholders via a series of workshops.
UI Design
Based on the research I focused my redesign on 3 key areas.
- Reviewing the order status labels to tell the customer more detailed about the fulfillment on an order
- Presenting the parts by ‘what is ready and not ready’ which would allow the customer to plan their time better
- Creating high level snapshots that gave large volume customers a quick view of where all their parts were.
Parts Order Statuses
A new set of order statuses were created to quickly tell if an order was partially or fully ready for pickup or delivery.
Customers with a large volume of orders could filter their orders by status and a color chip system was implemented to allow customers to quickly and easily identity which orders were fully ready or not.
Orders details screen
The parts were grouped by their availability status, customers said “I just wanted to know what is ready and not ready”. Parts available now at the top with parts on back order at the bottom.
Snapshots
The snapshots were designed to give the customers a quick high level view of where their parts orders are at.
The customer can click on them to give them a filter list of parts that match the category, then export to CSV for further analysis withing their own reporting systems.
Push notifications
Customers are time poor and replacement parts are often urgent, push notifications via the mobile app were crucial in communicating quickly to the customer that their parts were ready.
Impact
Adoption
- Parts Tracker drives 67% of HD360’s active customer adoption
- 37,374 Unique parts orders tracked in last 12 months
110.7% increase from previous 12 months
Customer Feedback
Post release I reached out to some customers to get their feedback on the new parts tracking features.
- “I have reviewed the updates and I like the additional information we can obtain in this system that can really reduce the unnecessary phone calls with this new visibility”
- “I find HD360 app very easy to use and find parts tracking especially handy because it is much easier for us to look in the app than to go through all our emails. “
- “the new [parts] status tab on the parts order screen is a game changer for us”