Booking requests come from suppliers, who are well-informed about their products. The primary goal of the booking process is to speed up the shipping line. When suppliers decide to book a shipment, they are usually very willing to use our services. Through the booking form, we gather all the necessary details and provide a precise shipment plan. Once the client approves, the shipment process begins. In short, to move forward with a shipment, we must collect the required information via the booking form
Booking form is a single page for our client(supplier) to book a shipment for the buyer. Based on data collected from “booking form” web page, less than 70% users had finished the form. Moreover, the completed form are not collecting right or enough information. Ops has reported that, they still need extra info from clients after they finished the form.
1.Why suppliers face difficulties in completing the form? What are the difficulties?
2.What information do Ops need to collect from booking form?
I conducted several user interviews with Ops dealing with suppliers and got below big findings
1.Most suppliers are not native speakers, they don’t understand the term(even to native speaker, some terms are very vague).
2.Inputs areas are related to each other, the selection on some inputs may effect other inputs(For example, if user typed in pick up location, origin port could be optional).
3.To users, the less, the better. But to Ops, the more, the better.
4.Some info can be collected from other paper docs, but when supplier is booking, those docs may be not ready
By watching full story records, I tried to figure out the timing and reason suppliers quit the form.
1.Location selector is confusing to most users. Users copied and pasted in the box, and left the box. They consider it as free text input rather than selector.
2.Some questions/options are not understood. Users stop on those questions for long.
Besides, there are some collected detailed issues reported by PM, I talked to Ops to validate those issues. Especially for dangerous good, it is a very specific area, only certain Ops are familiar with it. below is the DG flow I drew after interviewing with DG Ops.
Inputs field only had normal status before, in the new design. There are mupltiple status - normal, focus, error, optional. In the past, picker had icons at left and right. To make the design more consistent, icons would be put at left for all kinds of pickers.Radio btn is too small to act in past design. In the new design, options would be changed to giant clickable area.
Other change in design:
1. Placeholder would be there only when necessary
2. Descriptive label
3. Kill all caps, increase legibility
4. Inputs would stand out on grey background
For each input component, the improvement is below.
