client: ROVA

role: lead product designer

duration: 11/2018 - 06/2019

ROVA is platform that provides last-mile delivery for businesses by utilizing independent contractors who deliver items from point A to B.

My first objective was to tackle was giving the first beta UI a face lift and incorporating some of the findings that were discovered during a couple of earlier field tests that were conducted prior to my onboarding. The voices and concerns of the drivers is what led to the need of the facelift.

We had a less than ideal sample size of two drivers who were willing to test our product. Their time and experience was very valuable to us, and therefore we came up with two personas to work with, also based off their interactions with other drivers as well, and considerations of generalized statistics about the driver demographic (ex. majority of drivers identify as male, and between the ages of 20-45, etc.)

disclaimer: these are not actual images of the drivers

Overall, the features and system provided at the time supported a couple main items in the cycle of completing a delivery:

1) Driver was able to login.

2) Accepts a delivery.

3) Picks up the delivery.

4) Drops off the delivery.

takeaways:

The drivers generally enjoyed the simple aesthetic of the application, but some mentioned that it "kind of looks like Craigslist". However, Craigslist's goal is to facilitate sales between the buyer and seller through its simple UI, and building trust between the buyer and seller.

While this method is very hands off which allows the user a lot of freedom and necessary actions to constantly communicate with the seller/buyer. In contrast, the ROVA driver application requires a little more tools and visual indications to address some of the pain points the driver mentioned about the beta's overall aesthetic.

The exercise here is to identify what each type of user would experience in the timeline and what interactions would affect the other parties involved. This helped us better compile appropriate messaging in the interface as the platform in a sense acts as a communication tool for all individuals involved.

Further, this helped us map out roughly when and how messaging and parts of the UI would change appropriately to the given context depending on the user's occupation (customer, courier, recipient).

As a team, we identified how we wanted to present ROVA as a company, and what types of colors would scale over to the customer-facing platform as well. Leadership focused on delivering luxury and quality experiences which led us over to the royal feel of a blurple majority UI.

To make sure our assets had consistency, we agreed this was a good place to start establishing a design system.

Using the colors we identified as part of our overall branding guidelines, we incorporated them into the user interface.

Once we nailed down our major use cases, it was time to take our interface out for a test ride (no pun intended).

This surfaced a couple contextual scenarios that we didn’t think of prior:

If the driver had accepted an order in an area where there is no service (like an underground parking garage for instance), there was a lack of certainty for the driver whether or not that order had been accepted.

At the time that this was tested, I noticed some behaviors/actions where it was quite rigid for the user to be bouncing back and forth from ROVA to their choice of navigation.

When the driver arrived at the final destination for drop-off, a bug occurred asking the driver to "Try Again" after tapping "Drop Off Item". This prevented the driver from gathering a signature and receiving the proper feedback that their have completed the order.

takeaways:

Bringing the product out into the wild helped us reveal some use cases and behaviors that we otherwise would have not been able to pick up on in a controlled environment.

Nailing down foundational functions helped us prioritize what areas of the product were also most important to the drivers.