Armada Chain
Summary
Armada Chain is a supply chain collaboration platform that utilizes trusted and authenticated data for communication, analytics, provenance, or third-party solutions.
Role
Product Designer
Date
September 2019 - January 2020
My role as their first and only product designer involved product direction and management, wireframing concepts, UX, visual design, and prototyping. I worked closely with the 2 founders to redesign the entire product that aligns with their new direction and vision.
OVERVIEW
Armada Chain’s mission is to better the user experience in the supply chain industry while utilizing the distributed ledger technology (DLT) of the Hedera Hashgraph. By offering APIs that integrate with existing workflows, Armada allows enterprise-grade security and transparency in data to enable partnerships. This leads to new automation and applications while maintaining data privacy, security, and auditable records.
PROBLEM
Globalization has made supply chain processes more difficult to optimize
As one of the oldest industries in the world, supply chains now span multiple continents and several different parties. This results in communication difficulties, trust issues, and the usage of disparate systems and workflows.
DESIGN GOAL
Allows parties to share, audit, and utilize data throughout the supply chain
My goal as the designer on this product was to streamline the overall experience for users. This included creating the onboarding experience, the home dashboard, and several core features.
SOLUTION
The Armada Platform
No coding knowledge needed
Create and customize your supply chain process without an engineering team. Drag and drop form fields and other components when setting up your supply chain.
Stay up to date with notifications
Receive real-time alerts when action is needed or changes occur within the supply chain.
Network with teammates and partners
Utilize the network tab to see connected partners and fellow teammates. Gain insight into your teammates’ ongoing and active projects.
Connecting the different data ecosystems in a supply chain together, to coordinate and collaborate effectively at scale.
RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
Understanding supply chain
I conducted research through
Research insights
Make it accessible
Remove the barrier of needing a coding background or engineering team in order to modify processes
Lower cognitive overload by reducing nonessential interactions and elements
Proactive and reactive
Design to help identify bottlenecks and errors before they arise
Be concise and clear with alerts that require immediate attention—every second counts
Seamless integration
Integrate with existing workflows and new features that work both independently and collaboratively
Establish a sense of trust in the design, reassuring data is secure and encrypted
Analyzing our product position and competitive advantage among other established and emerging supply chain solutions
Sourcing and interviewing users and experts in the field to synthesize data into actionable insights
Seeking feedback and conducting usability tests with customers and clients
Conducting research allowed me to challenge my initial assumptions of users’ needs. This allows me in designing a product that better serves our future customers. I synthesized my findings into 3 main points relevant to Armada’s user and business goals.
BRANDING
A new look for a new vision
Initially a hackathon project based on dropshipping, Armada evolved into a startup focusing on supply chain collaboration. Because of this pivot, the original vision of the company changed. Obviously, their website needed an update.
Keeping design consistent
Good UI and UX emerge after iteration and implementation through a set of standard design elements, components, and patterns.
Keeping in mind future scalability, I started working on design guidelines to assure everything produced was visually aligned. I wanted the visual assets to convey a 'professional and welcoming' feel throughout the experience.
FINAL OUTCOME
A supply chain platform that integrates with existing workflows
Dashboard
For Armada’s first release, the founders and I determined that the core product of the Armada platform would be split into 4 tabs: Dashboard, Business Activities, Network, Open Waters (API dashboard).
A high-level view into the shipments currently in progress with an opportunity to drill down into specific actions and flows. The dashboard tracks freight with real-time overviews and visualizations and is reactive and proactive toward mitigating issues through notifications and visualizations.
Business Activities
Start new Business Flows between multiple parties and follow track and trace operations. Business Flows manages the exchange of data and conditional processes on Armada. Each Business Flow consists of a series of steps that can represent a product’s lifecycle, logistic processes, or a shared process between a group of companies.
In the track and trace overview, users can modify the logistics, view current and past locations, and upload necessary shipment documents.
Network
View connected partners and teammates. Partner details will contain all the necessary and relevant information about that company’s locations and contacts. The network tab will serve as a directory for teammates on Armada as well, displaying their titles, level of data access, and projects they’re working on.
Open Waters
While Business Flows control the data flow aspect on the Armada platform, Open Waters is how data is aggregated. Open Waters is the integration tool kit to connect data sources to Armada. When data is sent through Open Waters, it is linked and encrypted to the respective business flow it is associated with.
Outside of posting data, Open Waters can pull data from the Armada as well, allowing direct data feeds to systems.
LEARNINGS
Pivots happen, build trust, compromise
Being the only designer at a very nascent startup means that things can and will change—a lot. Right from the start, I made sure to be communicative by providing rough deadlines for when I could finish design tasks. This helped me stay accountable and set expectations with my team. I also learned to let go of designs I may have spent considerable time iterating on, knowing that I could always revisit or reuse assets I’ve created.
I had to thoroughly think through the many of the common use cases that users may approach in each flow. Building a platform that has high-reaching goals, I sometimes found myself perfecting designs that weren’t as essential to solving our main problems. However, I learned to take a step back, reassess my time, and efficiently move forward.
NEXT STEPS
Keep iterating
With our core feature offerings done, the current goal of Armada is to secure potential clients and continue fleshing out our product as a whole. Based on the feedback gathered from our initial group of users, our strategy is to continue to update our core features. Also, improve the overall experience and usability of our product.