KLog.co SaaS Platform

Designing a SaaS platform for Freight Forwarders.

Overview

Seeking to position itself as a pioneer in the Freight Forwarding industry in Latin America, logistics company KLog asked me to lead their SaaS platform project, their biggest initiative for the years to come in order to pursue their goal, by discoverying best practices and setting alignments for them to start migrating their current application to a complete and robust SaaS product for their clients.

My role

Product Designer, defining the Strategy & Executing Product Discovery, Platform Analysis and Product designing.

April 2022 - Today (ongoing).

Background

KLog.co is the main company in Latin America to democratize international freight transport. Through its intuitive digital platform, users looking to import or export merchandise have full control of their cargo movement, being able to book and manage their shipments in the same place.

Recognizing the limitations of their current platform in relation to their business goals, I was contacted by KLog as an external consultant to lead the discovery and stablish the basis for this ambitious project as their biggest initiative for the next upcoming years.

I lead and mentor an internal KLog UX designer as we work together on this initiative.



The request

The request was very concise: to identify what best practices were needed to build a solid and complete SaaS platform considering the needs of their clients in the Freight Forwarding industry. With that as my starting point, KLog trusted me the complete strategy and methodology definition to perform this task.

Strategy & Methodology

Since it was needed to understand and uncover relevant information and alignments for designing a solution, I proposed to start with a Discovery using the Double Diamond Methodology.


Focusing on the Discovery Phase, a deep Research and study on some of the top competitors of the industry was proposed, along with different SaaS solutions analysis from in and out the logistics industry, Stakeholder interviews, User complains analysis, an Alignment Session and a Cognitive Walkthrough through the current application to have a complete panorama of the context and the path to take towards the solution.


First step: Diving in SaaS applications

To start this challenge, the first thing we needed to understand clearly was how SaaS applications worked, what benefits does they bring to companies, what best practices to consider and identify which players to look on for Benchmark from in and out the Freight Forwarding industry.

"SaaS technology has the potential for faster performance and lower cost. Engaging current customers, generating new customers, and providing a better experience with SaaS best practices is key to growing a business."
-Retently.com | The three causes of Churn

So we desk researched about these topics and came up with a clear understading of SaaS applications, considerations for proper building and their top players within the industry and others.




Benchmark

From a selected list of six Freight Forwarding companies plus three other business management software we did a Benchmark following the criteria of studying:

  • Service models and their solutions.
  • Website structure and contents towards users, in order to know the entry point to the SaaS product.
  • Software structure and main components



Concluding this Benchmark we had a clear understanding of not only how SaaS applications work and its benefits to a company, but also how they're built and what solutions companies offer to clients, and how.

Interviews: Knowing business goals and user pains & needs

After knowing the kind of product we're studying, we ran a round of interviews with Key Stakeholders to understand their goals and ideas towards the product and to obtain relevant information of their type clients: sizes, behaviors, segmentations, etc.





With a set of relevant questions for seeking the results we wanted, we had a series of sessions that allowed us to know their clients: size categorization by amount and frequency of Cargo requests, average behavior and needs according to their size.

As for user pains and needs, although we had a notion of them due to the previews interviews with the business, we went through the complains database provided by the Customer Service Area in order to go deeper into specific pains and start mapping them in our research.



Defining the Key Pillars

Having all this information at hand, including the previous study on SaaS platforms, we had a session with KLog to define the Key Pillars that the future Application should have.



  • Personalization
  • Real-time data visibility
  • Reporting
  • Project and task management
  • Integrations
  • Collaborative work
  • Training
  • CRM (external)
  • ERP (external)

At this point a presentation was made as a first deliverable with a complete documentation of each step of the process, leaving the client very satisfied and eager to see some examples of what we've defined together.



Designing the idea

Having delivered the Discovery Phase, it was time to sketch the solution and land all the knowledge gained with the study so far, preparing the prototype that will be tested and validated with users in the next phase. But before getting into that, we needed to check and the current platform KLog has screen by screen and the average behavior of the different clients within it, so we can understand what section to prioritize for the design example.

For that, we analysed the current platform and consulted Mixpanel to get the data we needed to put together a simple flow of an average user journey.

Analyzing the current platform



Having looked the current platform we identified several usability improvements, besides knowing and mapping all the services that the platform already offered to its clients, which could be improved and which services were missing that we needed to implement to make this product a robust SaaS application.

Of the pillars defined, we found that the current platform allowed users to: Book & Pay cargos, Follow them in "real" time and Basic reporting, but it didn't offer:

  • Personalization
  • Accurate Real-time data visibility
  • Advanced Reporting
  • Project and task management
  • Integrations with other apps
  • Collaborative work
  • and Training for beginners

According to User pains and needs, they complained about not having accurate real-time data visibility, a more advanced reporting service, lack of event alerts with their cargos and problems understanding the use of some sections of the platform.


Understanding the typical use of the current platform

Consulting the Mixpanel tool, we understood how a typical usage of the platform was and the difference of usage between the clients categorization XS, S, M and L.


With this information, we identified which screens to design for the first proposal and to make tangible all the knowledge so far.

Design and technical definitions

By this point we were in condition to put our hands on designing, so we started with a simple draft on abord which led to a series of Design principles and definitions towards the structure, architecture and UI design.



Design principles




Architecture

Setting a Panel-centric structure, were the home screen acts as a consult page for the necessary information in the form of a Dashboard, and from there, navigate to every other section for specific actions or data visualization.



Wireframes



Widgets



UI Kit



The Design





Next steps

As this is an ongoing project, this design has been presented to the company and obtained de approval for continuing with the design pocess, which includes the respective stages of User testings and iterations, Refinement sessions and Widget ideation workshops according to user and business needs.