UPS and Small Businesses

UPS (United Parcel Service) is a premier package delivery company that leads in providing global supply chain services and solutions. They are known for delivering for 1.6 million shipping customers to 11.1 million delivery customers across over 200 countries/territories.

To enhance the experiences of small business owners who work from home during the shipping process.

How can we help make the UPS shipping process more comfortable for small business owners?


How can we facilitate direct relationship-building between our users and UPS.com?

Client

Methods

Team

Duration

16 Weeks

United Parcel Service

Website Analysis

Task Analysis

Stakeholder Interview

User Interview

Survey

Contextual Inquiry

Competitive Analysis

1 Project Manager

2 UX Researchers

2 UX Designers

Objective

Solution

A redesigned personalized dashboard on the UPS.com website for Micro and Small Enterprises (MSE's) of varying maturity levels that makes shipment activities and services centralized, easily accessible, and personalized to the business’ profile and maturity. This will allow MSE's a personalized shipping experience that is more convenient, efficient and conducive to business growth.


My Contribution

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Research Methods

Research Questions

How do MSEs currently engage in shipping and logistics out of their own homes?


What constraints do MSEs face in handling their shipping and packaging independently?

What constraints do MSEs face in handling their shipping and packaging independently?

What do MSEs operating out of homes value in the shipping and logistics provided by carriers?


Website Analysis

Competitive Analysis

We wanted to investigate the information architecture of UPS website and the steps users would take when interacting with the online shipping services.


Understand the relationship between different pages and discussed if the UPS website provides a reasonable paths to pointed user task.

Let’s begin!

  1. Information was spread out

  2. The three tiers of relationships users can have UPS are very ambiguous

  3. No accessible services were found throughout the website walkthrough

  4. The UPS site offers a wide variety of customer support options for businesses


FAFSA

Home


Upon learning more about the features offered and information architecture of UPS.

Understand the strengths and weaknesses of frequently used shipping and logistics features between UPS, its competitors and its indirect competitors

We found that when comparing our list of features between UPS an their other market competitors/collaborators, UPS lacks in providing easily accessible resources and features for businesses to use for their growth, an important factor to consider when working with small and micro businesses who do not have a variety of outlets to grow their business from.


We found that users value being highly involved with the status of their parcels and frequently consider convenience, reliability and cost.


7 competitors (2 carriers, 2 3PLs, 3 E-commerce)


14 categories with 4 focused on accessibility, 5 focused on stages of shipping process, 2 on MSE-specific features

  1. Two users

  2. Recruited through convenience sampling

  3. Duration was two hours with interview and observation section


The participants provided general information about business history and discussed the physical and online services and tools they use after receiving confirmation of an order. We made sure to make regular interjections to get context on why certain decisions were made, understand what the MSE was thinking, and to probe them on additional questions we had. Field notes were taken while the participants took us through each step of the shipping process.

After discovering the features offered by UPS in comparison to other competitors, our goal now is to use task analysis to investigate the end to end experiences when shipping items. With the use of the findings from Contextual Inquiry and Proxy data , the team began with an anachronistic list of all goals, sorted goals, then built and sorted each of our users tasks within each goal.


To understand the steps our users take to fulfil their main objective and to have an understanding of what high-level decisions users will make at each stage of the shipping process.

A task analysis flow chart was created with 9 key steps, starting from locating an order to managing returns and claims. In each step, there is an associated goal as well as subtasks for the goals.

To better understand the shipping process experience, we interviewed two UPS store franchise managers in the local Midtown Atlanta area for an hour and generated an affinity map to analyze the data.

To better narrow our focus, we used a survey to understand how and why users decide on their selling, order management, and/or carrier platforms. It was also a chance to understand what stages of the shipping process and features in the stages users prioritize.


Questions were formulated and centered around how businesses decide on selling and order management platform. The questions were based on the stakeholder interview analysis, CI findings, and task analysis. Recruitment was done through snowball sampling, in-person visits (farmer's markets), private messaging, posting on social media and email lists.



To finalize a deeper understanding of the survey results, we developed questions for our user interviews in which we gather general, ad hoc sentiments on the shipping process as a whole. Even so the questions are general, we were focusing on interviewing:

Once we completed our six user interviews, we used google sheets to organize summarized statements and code for themes. Data was organized based on how it related to survey findings then began creating second level data and then created the key findings based on the themes created from the second level data.


Reliability

Reliable package tracking & delivery (and the visibility of such) is a key priority for MSE's

Agency

Business Model

MSE's want to maximize control over the entirety of the shipment process

Business characteristics dictates their choice of selling and order management platform


Contextual Inquiry

Stakeholder Interviews

Now, we wanted to understand the subconscious decisions that MSE’s make during the shipping process.


At a Glance:

Interview guidelines using the findings from the website walkthrough and task analysis. The website walkthrough informed us of the UPS-specific services to compare with the store services while task analysis informed us the range of questions to span the whole shipping and logistics process.


Survey

After looking through the quantitative and qualitative data from the Qualtrics survey, we used the descriptive statistics tools, graph visualization features and grouped the free responses by key words in a spreadsheet in order to come to a conclusions.


User Interviews

Final Insights

Businesses who filled out a survey with a few people who did not.


Businesses that sell arts and crafts and clothing and accessories sectors specifically


Task Analysis

Convenience

MSE's are generally pressed for time and need to be able to ship out orders efficiently

Competitive Analysis

Task Analysis

Design Phase

User Needs

Design Implications

Design Sketches

Evaluation

Once our final sketches were agreed upon, our team conduct feedback session with HCI experts and UX researchers at Georgia Tech and at UPS. Experts were able to answer questions and score each of the sketches shared with them. Affinity Mapping and Evaluation Metrix was used to analyze the data received and found that the personalized dashboard was top-rated by both types of experts.

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Once wireframes were created, we tested them with users of our product. We were evaluating relevance and usability of “Create a shipment” and dashboard wireframes. Overall, a widget-based personalized dashboard was the most favored among the users. 

Website Analysis

Contextual Inquiry

Survey

Stakeholder and User Interviews

With our final findings, we were able to translate them to a set of user needs to help inform us of our users desire for when going through the shipping process. From the user needs, We then create design implications that integrates each of our user's needs into an element of our final design.


I want an order management platform that centralizes all the information I need, saving me time and offering the most ease of use.


I need to be able to quickly compare shipping rates across shipping services in order for the shipping process to be cost-efficient for me.


I need to understand my packages' status at all times and in a punctual manner. 


I need to have flexibility with drop off and pick up options to suit my shipment volume.


I want to understand what insurance options will help my business minimize financial losses on claims.


I want carriers to offer better advertising and branding services that would benefit business growth.


I want to learn more about how to build trusting relationships with my carriers.


System should display order management tools on centralized dashboard immediately to user.


System should allow for straightforward comparisons of shipping rates.


The package tracking system data should visualize the package's journey for users to easily understand and interpret.


System should reorganize claim management guidance to be more transparent and actionable for businesses. 


System should communicate consistently to small business owners about applicable services.


System should encourage direct interaction with carriers' online and in-person services in shipping an item.


 System should redesign the pick up process to make it more reliable and safe.


What I Learned

Researched two companies for competitive analysis

Developed and organized the task goals

Extracted key insights from task analysis

Produced protocol for stakeholder interviews

Lead Stakeholder interview and analysis to narrow focus for final method

Produced survey questions targeting our user group

Deployed survey by visiting local pop-up markets for MSE’s and posting flyers on social media websites and local UPS stories

Interviewed small business owners in the Metro-Atlanta

led analysis for user interviews to extract insights into user needs and design recommendations

Goal

Research Findings

Goal

Research Findings

Research Findings

Goal

  1. UPS drivers are independent from the UPS franchise stores and run their own way

  2. ​UPS stores and UPS warehouse have a more distant relationship that customers are not very aware about

  3. There are many in-store services such as the mailbox services and printing services which are useful for business owners for managing their package and business addresses

  4. Some hidden services that UPS offers but customers are not aware about such as the variety of printing services that small business could benefit them, alternative UPS network drop-off/pick-up options

​5. There are issues with UPS store services such as package pickup, returns and customer service

  1. Small businesses seek cheaper shipping price


  1. Most businesses are micro-businesses, working in crafts + operating out of home.

  2. Most business are on E-commerce and 3PL platforms for order management.

  3. Most businesses choose their carrier based on rate comparison and reliability.​

  4. Package tracking generated the most free-text response keywords out of any other aspect of the process.


Goal:

Methodology of Analysis

Research Findings

Research Findings

To understand how services offered differ between in-store and online while also understanding the relationship users have with UPS through the perspective of our stakeholders who interact with them most.

Much of what was said during interviews was similar to what we found in the survey but with added detail and explanations that could not be seen in the survey. There were also thinks in the specific pain points found in the survey that were not as prominently found in the interviews.


Research Findings

  1. It is important to have a rationale to every method or choice used when going through the research and design process

  2. I learned how to execute different UX research methods while also understanding when it is best to use them.

  3. I realized how teamwork can offer the opportunity to uncover other ways of approaching information and provide more information that was not considered before

About Me

My Work

Resume