Porth - Enhancing Usability

A bit of context

Porth is a startup web platform that facilitates international trade by automating shipment tracking, unifying the communication and document-sharing between different collaborators, and much more all in one place.

Nowadays, international trade workers spend most of their working hours checking the status of their shipments one by one by searching the tracking number of each shipping company. With Porth, that tedious work will be a thing of the past.

The Problem

One of the key elements to fully use the platform is for users to add their shipments so they can start to make the most of the platform. Thanks to user testing and the careful inspection from the Data Analyst in the team, we were able to identify that users had complications in filling in the required information.

“Even though I’ve been using Porth for over three months, I always forget to add the Shipment name.”
‍- Feedback from a user

The Design Process

Time is of the essence while working in a startup, that’s why for quickly designing a solution I used the Lean UX Methodology. This consists of three steps: Think, Make and Check

1. Think

I always start my design process by gathering information. From asking users for feedback, viewing their interaction in Fullstory, asking the dev team if there were any specifications, suggestions or limitations I should be aware of before redesigning.

After the research, we found that there were… a lot of issues. The three most common problems were:

1. 90% of the users skipped over the “Name your Shipment” input field (even if they were active users) and weirdly enough, it’s the only field that’s required.
2. Users expressed confusion and concerns regarding the checkboxes besides the titles and whether not checking it, but inserting the tracking information will nullify it (it didn’t, but they had valid concerns).
3. The three buttons at the bottom of the screen generated uncertainty in where to click because as users expressed: “Their initial impulse is to press the green button to finish the process”.

2. Make

3. Check

After the design was finished, I ran some user testings with the mockups to see if there were any issues that could be fixed before developing. The outcome: even in the prototype phase, the improvement in the usability was clear.

The Results

Users were able to easily and rapidly identify what and where they needed to put their information. Though a user still verbally expressed confusion for the purpose of the Shipment Name field so further redesigns could still be developed if this becomes a recurring problem.