sennder is a digital freight forwarding marketplace that helps trucking companies find loads to transport across Europe.
Role
Senior Product Designer
Year
2022 - 2023
Visual Design Overhaul
Situation
Our platform was initially built for small trucking companies to manage 1 or 2 open orders at a time and did not support mobile use. Most of the most important information was hidden in modals. End users weren’t getting paid in a timely matter because they didn’t understand the status of orders. If they were on the go they wanted to be able to check if they got paid on their phone. They also mentioned (and I also observed) that the UI was buggy and they did not trust it. We needed to redesign our platform to promote trust, support larger organisations, and to be mobile friendly.
Obstacles
The main goal of the year from engineering was to update the backend, so most projects that involved UI changes were deprioritised. We also lacked a dedicated front end developer and product manager. There had already been a redesign of this prior to my time, but it never had a round of feedback from users nor was it implemented. There was also a mobile app team that had similar features being built but the two teams were not communicating.
Action
I reviewed the previous redesign and talked with many stakeholders to create a design with long-term goals in mind. I was able to leverage a new UX Research project’s findings to add missing information for our end users to improve their overall experience using this section of our platform. I was able to find a front end developer to temporarily join our team to make this project work. I was also part of our design system team which allowed me to work on components that could be used across our platform, not just on this page. I also was working on both the mobile team and this one which allowed us to collaborate more effectively and be aligned on our goals and visual identity across platforms.
Results
This was implemented and we received positive feedback from our end users and carrier managers. The team did not use any quantitative metrics at the time.
What did I learn?
Sennder was my first job after moving to Berlin, and I was excited to join a fast-growing start-up. It was a great learning experience, especially navigating the challenges of hyper-growth, which I could compare and share learnings from my work with Bay Area based start-ups. I worked across multiple teams, moved quickly and somehow slowly all at once, collaborate cross-departmentally, and even designed the company’s first “summer camp” logo, created swag, and managed events.
