/ What is it?
When I joined FedEx, the company’s once-innovative technology, the PowerPad, had to evolve to meet the changing workforce and their business needs. I was placed on the Logistics Enhancing Operations product design team, LEO for short. LEO is the primary software FedEx Express uses for pickup and delivery operations.
I helped develop its product design strategy, create its design system, and lead the transformation for the most critical tool for over 85,000 FedEx Express couriers worldwide.
LEO provides an easy-to-use interface that ensures FedEx's operations and allows new couriers to onboard much faster with minimal device training.
Type
Quick Look
Role
Lead UX Designer
Responsibilities
Design Systems
Lean Product Strategy
Strategic Vision
/ The challenge
The current logistics marketplace is always seeing new opportunities to disrupt and get ahead of its competition. FedEx Express was in need to revitalize aging systems hindering its own innovation efforts and focus on user centered design as a standard.
The once-innovative PowerPad device, released back in 2002, was growing more and more foreign to younger, short term employee hires, and FedEx needed a replacement hardware and software solution for their package handling employees that was consistent across its stations worldwide.
Key factors that drove LEO were:
- PowerPad had a very steep learning curve not only for new couriers but even for new developers to make changes to it.
- Because all functionality was built on a single piece of monolithic software, updates to the PowerPad was costly and the cost of errors globally severe. Also, years of compounding changes left the UX complicated and convoluted.
- PowerPad was developed when data was at a premium, so the front-end interface and UX was placed on the backburner for cost.
It is pretty fun looking back and thinking of all of the meetings with key members from so many different walks of life within FedEx, taking so many early morning check in rides with couriers to get an idea of their experiences with both PowerPad and LEO.
The business requires the product team to partake in training as a courier to learn firsthand all the frustrations that FedEx Express couriers share every day. So designing everything for the courier's experience from the components for the design system to the style guide to even the supporting materials for our collaborative, cross-functional teams was critical throughout the product process.
/ The numbers
To kick things off, here are some fun stats to note!
Team size:
Over 150 team members in nimble, cross-disciplinary teams both onsite and offshore
Design team size:
First joined as one of 6 team members into UX Team of One Lead
Number of packages scanned with LEO:
In the hundreds of millions!
Users affected:
Over 85,000 FedEx Express couriers, ranging from college student hires to employees with decades of experience
My time on project:
2017 - 2024
/ What does the design strive to achieve?
The courier is the lifeblood of FedEx, so the first stage of this project started with research into getting into the “Day in the Life of a Courier.” We conducted many interviews and surveys from couriers in different parts of the world. An experience of a courier who delivers packages all day inside high-rise buildings in New York City is vastly different compared to one who picks up packages from homes and small businesses throughout the rural backroads in Iowa.
What about a courier’s proficiency with FedEx’s business practices and their personal experience with technology?
This is also coupled with them spending over a decade on a PowerPad device so how to we provide a fresh, seamless experience with a new smartphone while retaining familiarity with what they know? This was solved through interface auditing the PowerPad experience and going through case studies with Google’s Material Design.
One book that I found extremely helpful on how to talk to couriers was The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you by Rob Fitzpatrick. It described how important it is to interview diverse people while focusing about their life instead of your idea and design!
Summarizing our research, we strived to achieve: “Does this user flow or user interaction guide the courier to complete their daily task more effectively?” As we observe couriers using LEO, there are four UX design criteria we can use to evaluate their interactions.
- Effectiveness: How well were couriers able to perform a task?
- Efficiency: Were couriers able to perform a task within an error range?
- Intuitiveness: Where couriers able to a task within an expected time frame?
- Ergonomics: Did the courier perform the task within expected interactions? How did they change?
/ The transformation
Original PowerPad
Scratching the Research & LoFi Wireframe Surface
LEO Device
/ What went wrong?
You know what they say about having too many cooks in the kitchen, especially within a large team with multiple projects being prepared concurrently. Throughout the project’s timeline, confusion across teams could transform into where days feel like herding cats. Good design starts with good communication.
It took a lot of personal growth and practice to build my skills on storytelling and give out effective presentations to break down information. Throughout my time in the project, I created monthly workshops for the product owners and the development teams to become more familiar with our design system, voice & tone, and strategy on each app in the suite.
I also led a project sync meeting with my PMs and POs every week to keep them up to date where I am at with my projects, walk through the latest design updates, and share new learnings that I had with other stakeholders. Meeting Design: For Managers, Makers, and Everyone by Kevin Hoffman was an excellent guide for me to design meetings.
/ The business impact
"Faster."
"Reliable."
"Predictable."
"This device works even without being on any network."
"What you need stares at you in the face when you need it."
Those were the responses that our couriers gave in contributions for our project to win FedEx’s Operations Hall of Fame Core Award. We also obtained 100% deployment within every single FedEx station in the US which phased all PowerPad devices in place of LEO with over 85,000 devices, and we also have full deployment of LEO across the globe.
It was a massive scale operation where the job is never truly finished as we continuously receive feedback from couriers all over the world.
/ What we learned
We achieved an incredible mobile experience for couriers that guides the courier throughout FedEx’s rigorous business rules using progressive disclosure.
But we learned that the complexity of LEO being a device that must take on the role of many hats: from being a cross-system interpreter and communicator between numerous FedEx systems internationally to being a package scanner, a Dispatch messaging service, a timecard manager, and more causes a frustrated courier to blame and dismiss the LEO device when something goes wrong.
It is not “Oh, this service is down at this time.” but instead “Oh, LEO (as a whole) sucks because it is not helping me right here, right now.” due to LEO being taking on that role throughout the company as the single source of truth.
So, all the different FedEx business and development teams must work together to create a great holistic experience, and cannot try to solve problems alone.