| Creating a tech brand to compete with Uber using UXR
Great Freight
The win:
Led a research study for a Forbes “Next Billion-Dollar Startup” to define brand and design principles, resulting in a new UI direction.
My Role:
Associate Creative Director, (Product)
User Researcher
Stakeholders:
Director of Product Design
Director of Marketing
Senior Executive Team
Timeline:
3 months
Team:
Me, myself, and I
00.
NEXT Trucking was competing with Amazon, Convoy, and Uber Freight
But as a business and brand in its infancy, it lacked a brand position and point of view for
it’s product and design.
Primed by years in brand and visual design, I led the task to establish this sans support of any external partners.
01.
I first created a research outline, identifying the broad goals:
• What was our NPS?
• How would they describe NEXT?
• What is their best memory of working with us?
• Did our app succeed, or not, in helping plan their jobs and, thus, their income?
02.
I advocated for, and secured, a small budget to survey our marketplace drivers
receiving a ton of quantitative and qualitative data from 175 drivers.
After coding and synthesizing the data,
6.33 NPS
we averaged at a
And identified the following themes:
Opportunity
Efficient
Reliable
Trustworthy
Cool
Indifferent
Untrustworthy
02.
I applied the Aaker framework to this data to determine what dimensions of personality our brand occupied:
03.
Those brand tenets became the backbone for creating NEXT’s design principles:
Reduce Friction as Priority
Define what seamlessness means both in our interfaces and the physical journey a driver experiences in completing a job from our app.
Context as Definition
Consider the relevance, perspective, environment, circumstances, ease, and user story of your design.
Understand when to best use innovation in your specific context to excite and engage the user.
Value the Craft
Every element in your design is a building block of our commitment to delivering the best-in-class experience and a cohesive concept, driving preference for NEXT.
Consistency is Key
Any touchpoint a NEXT app user experiences would be recognized as part of the brand.
