Dr. Frankenstein’s tech "platform" holistically reimagined—from the ground, up
The problem: Navisphere, C.H. Robinson’s 20+ year-old legacy technology “platform,” is an amalgamation of various disparate individual products. This results in frustrating limitations and inconsistent or redundant experiences.
The solution: a fully reimagined, cloud-based, enterprise resource planning tool (ERP). My team and I created a modern, user-friendly way to manage the logistics quote to cash lifecycle. We started with the global navigation strategy, pattern library (including the innovative workspaces concept), and baseline design system.
Our users
My team and I wanted to create a holistic platform environment for C.H. Robinson employees (a variety of personas within themselves), their customers, and their carriers. The company has 15,000 employees in every continent but Antarctica, countless commercial accounts, and contractual relationships with over 66,000 transportation companies (including motor carriers, railroads, air freight, and ocean carriers).
This is one of our internal power users. They use all four monitors and both desk phones throughout their day.
For the redesign of such a large system with a vast base of users, we chose to start with our own employee user base. Within that group of people, there are a variety of job roles and job families.
Scope and constraints
This is an on-going, multi-year project. The current technology landscape was fraught with lost code bases and is evolving through major overhauls to bring products up to best practices. Our team was self-managed and afforded great freedom to innovate, however, we faced a lot of leadership changes and competing priorities.
Project timeline
This is a multi-year project which started in April, 2019 and continues to today. This timeline is to represent the several redirections and phases the project took throughout my time on the team. (Select image to zoom in.)
My role
The team officially included myself and two other Senior UX Designers. We worked closely with a project manager and multiple teams of developers, enterprise architects, business partners, and leadership. My role included research, strategy, vision casting, user interviews, workshops, testing, information architecture, design, interactive prototyping, and design systems.
Global navigation and global search
UX research: competitive, comparative, and pattern analysis
These images show a the variety of competitive analysis that was completed on the project just prior to my joining the team. As a team, we updated this content throughout the project as new information came to life.
Competitive analysis
Comparative platform analysis
Comparative product pattern analysis
Initial global navigation concept
Prior to my joining the team, an initial concept for the system’s global navigation strategy was loosely defined. I was able to participate in testing this concept and found inspiration from the experience.
Current-state, end-to-end journey map
When a new UX Director began, we were tasked with mapping out the entire quote-to-cash lifecycle. We needed a way to tell the story of just how complex C.H. Robinson business and the Navisphere technology itself is.
Capacity Booking
My team and I honed in on one of the five business lines, which is known as NAST (North American Surface Transportation), for a single service line (truckload), for the happy-path workflow. Below is a single step of the over all end-to-end journey map for the capacity booking phase, which I contributed the most to.
Printed journey map
Below is a photo I took of our finished, printed journey map. It totaled over forty feet in length.
This marked the first time any legacy technology was journey mapped in the 120+ year history of the company.
Diagrams & concept models
Design Thinking workshops
Quoting workflow
Quoting workflow options
Quoting hi-fidelity wireframes
Prototype (version 1)
Prototype (version 2)
