Revitalizing the design experience for a logistics carrier

Since 2010, De Klok Logistics has been a reliable carrier in the Netherlands, specializing in fine-meshed distribution within the country. Since 2017, it has partnered with Vortex-Logistics, Van Vliet Transport and other sister companies, expanding its storage capacity to 150,000 m2 spreading over various locations in the Netherlands.

The Challenge

With an exponentially increasing fleet and an outdated shared ICT platform and primitive user interface, De Klok realized it was missing out on opportunities for continuous development and promotion of its digital platform and services.

The current logistic portal looked aged, non-responsive which prompted its customers (medium sized transport and logistic companies) to rely on their own services or a third-party logistic (3PL) provider.

De Klok recognized the need for a transformation of its current logistics platform portal in order to deliver its partners a seamless user experience. The company envisaged a centralized yet autonomous hub that gave its partners a bird’s eye view of all its operations.

What We Did

After extensive research and meetings with the stakeholders, Cloud Primero B.V. was selected as the partner to develop and maintain the new portal. The roadmap was laid out on a Miro board shared with my team.

The stakeholders identified six end-points or modules that the portal must have: a login screen, admin role, transport overview, shipment overview billing, track and trace and notifications.

We sketched the wireframes of these end-points and summarized them into four main areas: shipments, transport goods and track and trace and billing. This enabled us to simplify the user journeys.

Putting the customer experience at the heart of the redesign philosophy, it was agreed to keep the design dept minimal and avoid cognitive load by placing a few items on the left main navigation sidebar.

Following the wireframes, we created the final design. While designing the portal, we followed the component-based approach to keep the design scalable yet simple.

The design team stressed on the UX laws of common region, proximity and aesthetic-usability effect to establish modularity across the design.

The track and trace module provides a crucial tour d'horizon of the status of each shipment.

The Result

The newly refreshed design of the logistic portal provides De Klok Logistics and its customers a user experience which is optimized, customizable and cost effective. Customers have an easy-to-use software which communicates to them.

Future developments in the pipeline include a chat module and a mobile app to give De Klok’s customers a much personalized experience.