The Challenge & Process

Arrive's load board looked and felt like an Excel spreadsheet from another era. For carriers managing hundreds of loads and switching between countless tabs, this outdated interface created real operational problems. During high-pressure customer calls, they needed to quickly locate specific shipping details, but the dense data tables made this unnecessarily difficult.

I started with extensive user research interviews with internal stakeholders—the carriers themselves. These conversations led to dozens of wireframes and detailed user flow maps. A carrier's workflow is remarkably complex, touching multiple systems and requiring constant context-switching. I needed to understand this process deeply before I could make it better.

The breakthrough came when I started shadowing carriers during actual calls. I sat beside them, watching not just what they told me, but what they actually did. This observational research revealed a crucial insight: their actions often told a different story than their words. They'd say one feature was important, but I'd watch them repeatedly use a workaround for something entirely different.

Given the desktop-heavy nature of their work, I broke from the typical "mobile first" methodology and focused on desktop designs. Each iteration went through user testing sessions with real carriers, and their feedback directly shaped the next version. There were several complete revisions before we reached the final design—each one teaching us something new about how carriers actually worked.