Context

Visku (formerly known as Bis Henderson) are a logistics company who specialise in:

• Recruit logistics, supply chain & procurement professionals for other businesses

• Consult organisations in their logistics and supply chain i.e. network model

• Broker warehouse ‘space transactions’ - matching up customers who need to store stock and partners who have warehouse space

It was this last capability that they asked AND Digital in early 2023 to help them bring a brand new product - The Pallet Hotel - to market.

Visku’s initial offering for space transactions was a manual process and phone calls between the customer/partner and Visku would make up the bulk of the processes:

• Onboarding new customers

• Adding stock to their inventory

• Scheduling deliveries and collections

• Billing

This approach brought with it significant overhead, inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Visku therefore identified a gap in the market whereby:

1. The majority of these interactions could be automated, creating a convenient and highly scalable solution

2. They could offer short-term flexible warehousing for lower pallet volumes, where previously this would require bulky long-term contracts

3. The product could quickly cover the whole of the UK with a view to international expansion

My Role

As the lead designer at the beginning of the engagement, I shaped the project's direction during Discovery by conducting research, analyzing data, and collaborating with stakeholders to align on goals. I developed user personas, journey maps, and wireframes to address user needs effectively. I handed over to two other designers when transitioning to delivery.

Brief

Create the customer and partner experience and internal tools needed for the transaction of booking space within the Visku network, arranging deliveries and collections, managing accounts, and reporting and handling non-conformance incidents, as well as enabling the aggregation of multiple clients into a single entity for a partner.

HMWs

• How might we enable customers with smaller volume needs and more adhoc needs to use the service?

• How might we improve the service for existing customer?

• How might we aggregate customers into one entity for our partners?

• How might we reduce communication overhead?

• How might we remove or make paper-based processes more efficient?

Process

1. Market research

   1. Understand the competitor landscape

   2. Understand the business needs

2. User research

   1. Understand users, their frustrations, and needs

3. Design

   1. Rapid idea generation

   2. Low-fidelity prototype creation

4. Test

   1. Understand user pain points and needs

5. Iterate (loop with 4)

   1. Design improvements based on user feedback

6. High-fidelity prototype

   1. Create realistic prototypes of features

   2. Handover to devs for build

Steps 2-6 repeated for each product feature

Key challenges

• Large complex product

• Coaching client side during build

• Alignment with marketing

• Culture - less explorative

Key achievements/outcome

• Comprehensive user research and understanding

  • User needs

  • Pain points

  • Personas

• Competitor analysis

  • Understanding of what competitors are doing in this space

    • What are they doing well

    • What are they not doing well that we can capitalise on

• Comprehensive scalable design system

• Coaching parts of the business

  • Growing UX capability through imparting knowledge and working closely with marketing and IT

• Recruitment

  • Recruited a full development team for Visku, including a senior UX specialist to enable them after the engagement

• Full service/product designed and built

  • Number of opportunities in pipeline doubled

  • Size of supplier network has doubled

  • Able to successfully move into a new market

  • Increased sustainability of offering

    • All partner warehouses are ESG-compliant

    • Serving customers with lower Pallet volume increases the capacity of existing warehousing, reducing demand for new-build warehouses