About Stuart.

Stuart is a B2B delivery platform and on-demand logistics solutions for all kinds of businesses. In 2018, Stuart hit a tipping point and experienced exponential growth with more than 200k deliveries per week. -> View the website

Intro to Mission Control.

The Back Office is the platform used by our internal teams to manage the business and so it is an essential asset for the growth of the Company. The current version was designed and developed 7 years ago and it was starting to getting old and not able to follow and drive the incredible growth of the Business.

We wanted to re-think and re-built the Back Office from zero with the last technologies and with an improved UX to create a flexible platform to drive the business growth of the next years. The long term vision for the new version is to make it available also for the clients.

My role in the project was to undertake user research and evaluation of prototypes, work with developers and provide the best solution to create the new Back Office platform of Stuart. We named it: Mission Control.

The Design Process.

I approached this project following my usual design process. I started gathering information and data to understand the current situation and context, then I extracted and defined the key insights & opportunities and after presented all the results, I started exploring different ideas with the team and finally, we chose the best idea and I could create prototypes and run user testing to validate our solution.

1. Understand.

I talked and collected information from more than 50 colleagues around our offices in Europe to define the pain points and the opportunities with the current version. I also researched how successful companies approached this topic and checked if there were some best practice I should apply. 

How does the Back Office work? Who are the users? When, how and why they use it? What are the pain points? What are the opportunities? How others companies have approached this topic? …

2. Define.

From this research, I identified and defined the user groups and their experiences (4 different teams with different goals and needs use the platform), the user problems and the opportunities. At the end I presented the results to the product manager and the team, it’s very important to have everyone aligned and be aware of the results.

“It’s not intuitive, hard to use”

“It‘s very slow sometimes“

“It doesn’t make our life easier or more efficient“

3. Explore.

Then we run multiple brainstorming sessions to explore different ideas, sketch them on papers and whiteboard. We applied some of the Google Design Sprint techniques, like the crazy eights… The goal was to generate as many ideas as possible.

From all the ideas, we selected the best ones and I started working on the low-fidelity prototype of the new platform. I run multiple user testing sessions to validate the design solutions chose and be sure the user experience was first class.

4. Create.

After the first interaction with all the feedback got during the user testing, I created an improved high-fidelity prototype and run some additional user testing sessions.

The feedback and the user evaluations were incredibly positive and our internal teams are excited about the new user experience with the platform. The new user interface is slick and enjoyable to use, every element is studied to help the user to perform his work in the easiest and fastest way possible.

It’s just the first step to create a complete, scalable and integrated platform that can drive the company growth for the next future. We explored and discussed many different solutions to help our colleagues to perform their work in the most efficient way.

One feature we would like to implement in the future updates is the Voice Control. After many user tests, we believe that it can save time in the everyday task that our users perform every day.

The conclusion.

During these 2 months of work, I combined quantitative (data analysis) and qualitative feedback (expert interviews, user survey, user interviews and user testing) to create the best experience possible for our colleagues and help them to perform better during their daily work.

This is just the first version, of course, we could not solve all the problems we found during the research for time and budget constraints, but we planned to solve all of them with the next releases of the platform.