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The trucking industry is a vital pillar of the economy that most people undervalue. However, it is responsible for moving 70% of all freight in the United States, and 80% of US communities depend on trucks for the delivery of everyday goods, spanning from raw materials, food, medicine, and much more.
New Sound Transportation is one of the premiere logistics companies in the Pacific Northwest. They provide a plethora of transportation services to serve their customers and save them money; Northwest Truck and Trailer Repair, LTL freight and brokerage, the top CDL training school in Washington State, and over 70,000 square feet of cold storage and warehousing. They are a relatively new company, but their leaders have over 25 years of experience in the trucking industry.
There are two primary groups of users that regularly access New Sound Transportation's website; customers and drivers. According to my research, the information present on the former site was helpful to neither group. On top of that, New Sound Transportation is a modern company with an innovative outlook on the trucking industry, but their brand was reading as dated. NST wanted a website and brand that felt sleek and futuristic, and to have a system in place for future marketing and design projects.
Duration: 2 months
Role: UX/UI Designer, Researcher, Creative Director, Developer
Platform: Website
I conducted a series of remote tests, both moderated and unmoderated, to get a usability baseline for the website and to understand the problem space. I wanted to hear the sentiments of real people after using the NST website. I conducted a series of task-based usability tests, followed by heat maps and user movement recorded tests. The tasks were simple but ranged in activity from simply navigating through the website to actually finding specific information.
Notable feedback included:
“The website has a lot of text, honestly I just skipped over it."
“NST has such a modern facility but the website doesn't feel like it matches. At first I was like, is this the right place?”
“The pages all say the same thing, I don't know where to find information about the company.”
“Why are there so many pictures of people missing? It looks disorganized."
"I don't know what the different divisions mean. There is no information about who NST is. Why isn't that on here?"
The pain points I will be addressing in the redesign can be separated into three primary complaints. The NST website is:
With the user data and responses recorded, I wanted to further quantify the site's usability baseline. I used Nielsen's 10 Usability Principles as the baseline for my evaluation for the website. I worked page by page, feature by feature, and gave feedback. Sample results from the homepage are shown here.
Overall, compiling all of the sheets, NST Scored 4.3/10.
Because I want to redefine the structure and information architecture of the site, I decided to do feature/competitive analysis of other logistics companies in the area to give an idea of where New Sound can improve and rise above the competition.
Upon completion of our preliminary user research, we identified common themes that emerged from the data. We then clustered these common themes and labeled them with descriptive words or phrases.
After completing this first affinity map, we plotted the themes on a feature prioritization grid. This helped our team choose what problems we should tackle based on impact to the user and feasibility for our teams constrained time limits.
NST liked the original shape of the logo, but we agreed that the typeface and colors made it look dated. Keeping the shape consistent, I minimized the clutter and cleaned up the typography. The new logo connects to NST's roots, but is presented in a much more modern way. Because no brand guidelines existed, I created an entirely new UI Kit for the site to keep things consistent. The style guide exists as a hidden page on their website dashboard, so it can be easily maintained and referenced in the future.
The new branding and UI kit is sleek, modern, and clean as opposed to "bulky" and "a little old" quoted from users. The company wanted to focus on something that felt super cutting-edge. I kept things consistent with variant gradations of navy, but created pops of color and corresponding gradients to be used to keep panels exciting. With plans to for the business to expand in the future, the panel design system allows the customer to easily make edits to site content as this growth happens and services change.
A Business Card from a New Sound Transportation employee who has agreed to share their information publicly:
Based off of the results of the competitive and comparative analysis, NST leaders decided to add features that would benefit the customer. We were careful not to over-featurize, so we mapped our features on a prioritization grid and decided to add features - such as a user portal, online customer documents, and driver resource center - that were drawing customers away from NST to competitors. However, this left us with a challenge: whether to mend or scrap the previous navigational system. We knew that the previous navigation was a pain point for the users already, so we knew that this decision required careful attention. We ultimately decided to scrap and rebuild the navigation. After several iterations of card sorting and tree tests, my team learned that it was best to create a tab for each user.
Although the site was created in early 2022, the digital rebrand officially launched in early 2023, with a second brand modernization currently in progress.
