Summary
Andrew joined Flexport in the summer of 2014 as one of the first employees. He designed the first versions of the platform and hired and managed a design team.
Role
Director of Design, Lead Product Designer 2014 - 2018
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I joined Flexport,—a software-powered full-service freight forwarder—in 2014 as one of its first hires. In the beginning, there were only a few employees in a small San Francisco office. The company is now valued at $8 billion and has thousands of employees in offices all over the world.
Flexport’s mission is to fix the user experience in global trade. The company leverages software and industry expertise to provide more visibility and control, along with lower transaction costs and prices. Flexport is developing a worldwide network that is culminating in a new operating system for global trade.
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From zero to one
As the first designer, I used my visual, interaction, and research skills to help Flexport attain a product-market fit and scale its offerings. I then focused my attention on establishing, growing, and leading a design team.
I designed the first major version of Flexport’s client, partner, and internal apps as the product design lead. I helped reduce transaction and operational costs by providing greater user agency and control through design. I then built and managed a team of product, communication, research, and UI system designers.
I cannot show the majority of work I did at Flexport because of proprietary concerns. Below is a sample of some of the projects I directly worked on while leading design at Flexport.
Director of Design
May 2017 - July 2018
• Structured and built the design organization
• Managed managers and individual contributors
• Hired and retained top designers
• Strategic development of complex product areas
Lead Product Designer
Jun 2014 - May 2017
• Built and led a multi-disciplinary design team
• Designed Flexport's internal, partner, and client apps
• Conducted user research to derive key product insights
• Filed three patent applications
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User research is crucial at Flexport because of the complex workflows of the many user types that must be accommodated to make the system work. One of the first things I did at Flexport was to get out of the building and interview clients.
I conducted countless user research sessions to derive product insights. I employed user interviews, contextual inquiry and analysis, persona development, card sorting, etc.
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Challenge and Opportunity
One of my most significant insights from interviewing and observing the many people comprising international logistics was that no one knows it all. Each knowledge worker has a depth of subject matter expertise and knows enough about adjacent roles to get their job done.
This insight drove the product design architecture of our system, connecting the dots between each user type. Instead of just designing for a primary user type and accommodating secondary types, each product designer builds for the intersection of a diverse chain of roles.
International logistics entails stringent regulatory compliance. Each new client needs to provide many details, documents, and verifications before Flexport is allowed to serve them. The process is painful, which made me excited to design it from the ground up.
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I started the project by reviewing all the known requirements with my product manager. We agreed on business and user goals and began examining the common onboarding issues. I started to sketch ideas, while my product manager further defined all the exceptions and unknowns.
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We performed task analysis and defined the conditional flow. I then created a low-fidelity prototype and began to conduct usability tests.
I iterated the design based on insights from usability tests, as well as new requirements for exceptional cases (ex. what if the user is apart of a non-resident corporation and doesn’t have access to key documents?).
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I then created a high-fidelity prototype and conducted additional usability tests. Once we had high confidence in the new design, we began implementation. We then made countless tweaks to the compliance onboarding flow after its launch to accommodate unique use cases.
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Business outcome
The compliance onboarding redesign decreased the time to become compliant by orders of magnitude. Before the redesign, the majority of users needed help from customer service to complete the process, and unique situations were onboarded offline.
The new design enabled users to become compliant online in a matter of minutes with a stepped process that accommodated many diverse company types through conditional flows. The redesign helped us to serve clients that were previously unprofitable due to onboarding costs.
One of the primary touch-points of Flexport’s product system was the shipment dashboards and tracking pages. I worked closely with product managers and engineers to construct logistics visualizations, action-items, and a messaging system. These designs went through extensive testing, analysis, and iteration to provide a user with deep insight into their global supply chain.
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I sketched countless ideas and brainstormed new possibilities with my team. I created low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes to test. The outcome was three distinct views: a global shipments map view, a shipment list view, and a shipment details view.
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The global shipments map view provides a representation of a client's international freight movements. Users hover on the different shipments to see metadata and click to see a summary of the shipment in a card overlaying the map.
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The shipment list view shows shipments presented linearly. Users can sort and filter the list. This view provides a structured way to pivot information to commit subsequent action.
The shipment details view provides a single source of truth for an individual shipment. Users can see route details, shipment status, associated documents, products being shipped, and have the ability to contact their logistics manager.
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Problems solved
Antiquated technology like landlines and fax machines plague international logistics. Many shippers still piece together data from emails, excel sheets, and static websites to understand freight movements in their supply chain. This paradigm makes logistics opaque and difficult to discover and fix problems.
Flexport's logistics dashboards and shipment views enable shippers to track freight with real-time overviews and visualizations, discover exceptional cases through an alert system and contact the involved parties through a messaging system, providing instant clarity and a way to mitigate issues.
Building a better billing system with automatic updates, and easy ways to review and compare line items, export data, add payment methods, and pay for rendered services was imperative to the product’s success.
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I enjoyed thinking of ways to alert users to past due invoices, as well as increase transparency across our system. Many designers find these types of design problems boring. I find them fascinating.
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Outcome
Accounting for logistics services is a tedious process in global trade. There are many involved parties and service types. Flexport aimed to increase transparency by providing detailed itemized online invoicing.
The software I designed made paying and reviewing invoices easy through a user interface that describes each line-item and includes shipment and route information. Users easily added payment methods and paid for services.
I believe a good user interface emerges after implementation and shapes later implementation through a set of standard design elements, components, patterns, and views. I had the opportunity to design the first versions of the product before distilling the design system.
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As Flexport grew, so too did our design needs.
In 2016, the majority of my time became dedicated to managing the design team I built. As the director of design, I managed a group of 12, including product designers, design managers, a design system lead, a user research lead, and a communication designer.
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Impact and outcome
I collaborated and empowered the team to develop processes related to product design, hiring, leveling, research, critique, and many more areas. I also educated the leadership of Flexport on the role of design at the company and the many ways it contributes to business goals.
I have written about my experience leading design at a high-growth startup, as well as how I designed the design team. Flexport is always looking for talented designers to join their team. If you enjoy working on complex problems that have the potential for a major impact, apply for one of their open positions.
I believe the greatest opportunity for designers is in reinventing the antiquated industries powering our world. International logistics comprises 12% of global GDP, but the industry still operates like it’s the 80’s. Too many designers work on easy problems because they don’t know about the inefficiencies of industries that are three steps removed from their daily experience.
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As the web progresses exponentially, and user experience becomes a major part of business success, traditional and highly regulated industries like freight forwarding remain stagnant. This stagnation has produced many unnecessary barriers that — given the right foundation — design is uniquely qualified to address.
Global logistics—like so many other old industries—has the power to lift millions from poverty and increase global prosperity, as well as spark conflict, increase inequality, and pollute the world. A reconstitution of international logistics is coming, and it is vital to get it right this time. I believe the next decade provides a small window for establishing a new paradigm, and designers have the opportunity to help make it right.
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Promoting Flexport’s mission within the company was just as important as communicating it to external audiences. I did my part to propagate Flexport’s mission through design. As an example, I created employee anniversary badges. Employees proudly stuck the badges on their laptops with each passing year.
Makers are made up of engineers, designers, product managers, and data scientists. They came together to determine the guiding principles of the group. The values were born out of the shared context of their roles and were interpreted by the overarching company values. I had the pleasure of designing the posters.
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Joining a startup experiencing rapid growth over many years supercharged my experience as a designer. Every six months at Flexport felt like a new chapter in our development. We reached new stages of growth and maturity, and I grew along with it. It has been my most rewarding professional experience so far.
—Anthony Chen
Flexport's 1st employee | Forbes 30 Under 30
