About

Seldat Inc. is athird-party logistics (3PL) company that provides its customers-typically other logistics companies – with order fulfilment and warehousing services. Efficiency is at the core of the business. To remain competitive a 3PL company must often match the speed and the agility of its clients and to remain profitable, a 3PL company must scale quickly, take on new clients, and process large volumes of orders, as margins in this business are razor thin.

The Challenge

The entire business was managed by a set of Excel spreadsheets that were designed to handle everything from order fulfilment to customer billing. These files contained hundreds of fields tied by complex logic and required specialized training to use. The business could not scale. Spreadsheets inhibited task delegation and enforced a rigid data model. There was also no adequate alternatives. The best third-party solution available at that time was built on a decade-old platform and lacked business-critical features such as audit reports and the ability to handle bulk items.

The Research

User Interviews

Key Finding: Warehouse workers generally lacked adequate command of English, 3PL knowledge, experience using technology and overall education.

Customer Interview

Key Finding: The customers of Seldat Inc. were not impacted by the interaction with the system per se. They were just concerned about the end-results. A challenge however existed during onboarding. Every customer had a slightly different data source and data model that needed tailoring before the system could deliver value.

Ethnographic Observations

Key Findings: Warehouses can be incredibly large (up to 3 million square feet). Warehouses are generally poorly lit and lack adequate wi-fi coverage. Workers tended to make more mistakes with task saturation and with fatigue.   

The Strategy

Focus on Mobile Experience

A mobile platform would mean less time for workers to travel to the data entry terminal. The solution still included a desktop version that was designed for administrators. Even though it was incredibly feature rich, It was less refined in terms of UX.

Tailor Experience

Show only the options relevant to the worker's role. This meant less clutter which translated to improved learnability.

Make the experience as “Fisher-Price” as possible.

Big buttons, simple language andimages.

Prioritize features that contribute to efficiency and error prevention.

Smart defaults, bulk editing,barcode scanning, pre-submission, graceful recovery, etc.

Enable support for custom data models.

Custom fields, custom labels,etc.

The Outcome