With an in-house small business owner (our PM), our team was able to gain insight into how behind the logistics world lagged in terms of tech adoption

CONTEXT

What are 3PLs?

We found unless businesses are Walmart-sized, they have to rely on Third Party Logistics providers to do their heavy lifting (literally) for critical operations.

PROBLEM: BUSINESSES

Bad matches → Expensive Breakups → Waste of Time

Businesses lose time and money searching for 3PLs in disjointed ways only to find a superficial match that will cost hundreds of thousands later because of incompatibility

What’s going wrong?

UNRELIABLE SEARCH

Business owners resort to google searches, hundreds of calls, and chance encounters

BAD ALTERNATIVES

Consultants for 3PLs exist, but cost thousands, are slow, and still don’t provide a perfect match

How do 3PL Consultants have a job?

Businesses find so much value in being understand personally that they’re willing to throw away their money and time

We found an opportunity to provide this value in a different way

INSIGHT

It’s important to businesses that their nuanced priorities and needs are understood

PROBLEM: 3PLs

Can’t seem to stay in a relationship

3PLs don’t have the bandwidth to focus on self-advertisement which becomes even more of a burden with low business retention rate

74% of 3PLs say finding/retaining clients is one of their biggest challenges

3PLs also have to rely on caveman marketing tactics to get their name out

But, even when they do find a business to work with them, 30% of them leave within the first week

Why business-centered, not 3PL-centered?

CAN AFFORD TO COMPARE

Businesses are more concerned with finding the RIGHT 3PL and care more about the comparison process

DON’T HAVE THE BANDWIDTH

3PLs are more concerned with FINDING a business and don’t have the bandwidth to comb through options

SOLUTION

Trifect is an AI B2B marketplace that matches businesses and their best-suited Third Party Logistics Provider(s)

Onboard your business

Train Trifect to understand your business completely and thoroughly

Start a 3PL search

Click to add a 3PL and tell Trifect an initial idea of what exactly you’re looking for

Take a look at the details

Optimized to help you take a quick look at the granular details and easily compare your options

Add on to your search

Hold on to potential options, but keep having a conversation with Trifect to narrow down on your priorities

PROCESS

Business are the star of the show

Design decisions and other key insights all stemmed from this central one we extracted before

INSIGHT

It’s important to businesses that their nuanced priorities and needs are understood

ONBOARDING

This onboarding flow ties tightly into businesses desiring to be well understood but also provided our developers with the context needed to train the AI model!

USER EXPERIENCE

UX in onboarding → multi-step that provides reward, but enough clustering to prevent “next screen” exhaustion

KEEPING TARGET AUDIENCE IN MIND

The My 3PLs screen directly after onboarding comes from our research that revealed mid-sized businesses juggle 2-3 3PLs!

BACK AND FORTH CONVERSATION

We understood the core value of consultants as being able to talk back and forth when searching through 3PLs

This led to a result-centered AI chat system that feels like talking to a partner

MIMICKING REAL CONVERSATION

Didn't separate the results and chat space into different panels to mimic the mix of results and conversation IRL

HIGHLIGHTING MISSING ASPECTS

From interviews we found businesses want to know what a business cannot fulfill as well

BUSINESSES KNOW BEST

In showing businesses what a 3PL cannot do, they have the control to adjust their prompting and decide what’s important for themselves

The people have spoken! Interviewing businesses about their priorities, we noticed patterns across different businesses...

INSIGHT

Business have common important decision-making factors they want highlighted

LOCATION + COST

Location priority can differ based on closeness to retail shops, closeness to piers, or closeness to manufacturers

Cost can be a deal breaker

COST

Cost has greater hierarchy because of its importance especially for small/mid size businesses (our target)

LOCATION

Highlighting location is emphasized in map view, the results, and listing of how many locations

But we can’t forget the point of it all, having a lot of options and picking the best one

INSIGHT

Businesses want an easy way to compare and contrast different options

PINNING

Pinning is a tried and true method of building on previous searches to find the perfect solution, something that aligns with the values of our audience

EXPLORE + SAFETY

With limited space to see results, pinning created a compromise between exploring through re-prompting but not losing past results

HARMONY WITH MAP

Marrying the pin feature with the map view built onto the importance of location but also provides another level of navigation

THREE PANELS

With so many priorities, the 3-panel view prevents the friction of pop-ups or page changes to see 3PL details

QUICK GLANCE

Sacrificing some visual overload to cater to the need for a quick way to compare what 3PLs have and don’t have felt right for our users

HOORAY!

Successfully deployed!!

With a developed out prototype, a beautiful slide deck, and awe-inspiring pitch, our team presented to representatives from companies like Ghost and the founders of Bird Scooter!

What Did I Learn?

USERS KNOW BEST

Talking to just one user was a greater help than hours of brainstorming/researching! Even in UX, giving the users the reins is sometimes the most intuitive

DEV + PM = BETTER DESIGNER

Understanding what data we needed to train the AI model and finding product-sized holes in our pitch helped me to be a better and more holistic designer

Extra! Extra!

Thanks For Reading!!

Check out some other stellar work

Let’s create things that are out of this world!

esther.kim.5727@gmail.com