- Client
- World Oil — petroleum products, recycling and environmental services
- Role
- Information architecture, user flows and personas, UX consistency, UX inspection and audit
- Users
- Drivers, dispatch
- Way of working
- Agile, alongside product and engineering
- Platform
- Tablet and mobile
- Year
- 2022
The client
World Oil recycles, produces and transports petroleum products, and provides environmental services across California and the western United States. Their end-to-end services depend on drivers completing tickets accurately in the field.
The goal set for the engagement was direct: build effective solutions and apply them to the real problems in the World Oil product, rather than produce a concept.
UX challenges
- The product had accumulated usability problems across the driver flow.
- User feedback said the flow was unintuitive — the order of steps didn't match the order of the work.
- The interface predated the current design patterns and did not hold up on the screens drivers actually carry.
The tool is used standing beside a truck, not sitting at a desk.
The journey
A load has five moments that matter to everyone downstream: scheduled, arrived at pickup, departed pickup, arrived at delivery, departed delivery. Those five became the spine of the interface. They sit in a fixed rail on the left of every screen with a timestamp against each, so the driver never has to remember what they last confirmed, and dispatch is looking at the same record.
Starting a ticket
The ticket screen collects the load's identity — lookup reference, customer and contact, bill of lading, pickup and delivery locations, truck and trailer — and nothing else. Fields that come from dispatch arrive pre-filled and read-only; the only things a driver chooses are the truck and the trailer they're actually taking.
Underneath, the three legs of the run are listed with their distances: start, pickup at 49 km, delivery at 149 km. It answers the first question a driver asks before pressing Start, which is how far this is going to be.
Documents are the part of the job most likely to be done badly, because it happens at the least convenient moment. The dialog offers two choices at a size you can hit without looking closely: photograph it now, or pick one already taken.
Status and route
Once a run starts, the right-hand side becomes the map: the planned route, pickup and delivery pins, and a bar along the bottom carrying the destination, the time remaining and the distance.
The primary action in that bar — Arrived at Pickup Location — stays disabled until it applies. It's a small decision that removes a whole class of error: a driver can't accidentally mark an arrival that hasn't happened, and the status rail on the left stays trustworthy for everyone reading it downstream. Closing a ticket is similarly explicit and confirmed, because completing it removes it from the device.
On the phone
My role
- Information architecture for the driver-facing product.
- User flows and personas, so the sequence of screens matched the sequence of the job.
- UX consistency across the redesigned screens — shared patterns for fields, selectors, status and confirmation.
- UX inspection and audit of the existing product to find what was breaking.
- Working in an agile team, delivering in increments alongside engineering.
Screens are from the World Oil prototype delivered in 2022.