Inxeption
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Shipped 2021
Shipping apps: a shared navigation framework for industrial commerce
Role
Lead UX/UI Designer
Team
1 Product Manager 1 Project Manager 3 Designers VP of Engineering 4+ Engineers
Timeline
Jun 2021 – Nov 2021 (5 months)
Overview
Shipping was a growing part of the business
Inxeption's industrial commerce platform helped B2B companies quote, book, and track shipments, from local parcels to international cargo. This product experience needed to match the level of dedicated shipping platforms.
Problem
The shipping tools were there, but hard to reach
Inxeption's shipping offering was buried within the company's complex, singular platform.
Confusing navigation
Primary and secondary navigation worked as dropdown menus and looked like a breadcrumb trail, with the secondary menu changing based on the primary selection.
Fragmented experience
Each shipping type had its own navigation pattern, with labels and breadcrumbs that changed from one to the next
Process
Truckload came first, then the foundation around it
Shipping was the starting point for standalone apps
Inxeption had an initiative underway to break its complex, singular platform into standalone apps, all accessible through a platform-wide app menu. Each shipping type would become its own focused app. A separate initiative I’d led earlier that year to elevate form UI and UX gave the new apps a consistent visual foundation to build on.
Learning how a truckload moves
With Truckload as Inxeption's first standalone app, I did a deep dive into the personas and flows involved in moving a full truckload, from the business requesting the shipment to the carrier delivering it. The core user was the business requesting the move, who needed to request quotes, book a shipment, and track it from pickup to delivery, without fighting a complicated system to do it.
Keeping every shipping type in view
Once Truckload was underway, the next challenge was how users would move between shipping types and within each app. The Director of UX, who had also advised on the platform-wide app menu, guided the information architecture. I explored several approaches, from dropdown and hamburger menus to variations of a persistent bar, and chose a persistent bar for shipping types with a vertical, collapsible sidebar for each app's pages. A horizontal subnavigation would have pushed content further down and not scaled well as pages were added, and menus would have hidden the shipping types. This combination avoided both.
One foundation, adapted to each shipping type
The Track landing page kept its map view but reimagined the list as a card-based layout, giving shippers a clearer view of each shipment. Filters that had been presented as dashboard metrics became chips, a new pattern for filtering list views that takes up less space and scales as filters are added. For the International app, the platform previously only supported uploading container data for tracking and viewing details. The quote and booking flow was entirely new.
Proposal
Four shipping apps, one consistent experience
The result was a suite of focused, standalone shipping apps, each dedicated to a shipping type and accessible both from Inxeption’s platform-wide app menu and from one another. Shippers could now quote, book, and track shipments from one streamlined experience instead of a complex singular platform. Truckload and International are shown below, and LTL and Parcel shipping apps followed the same patterns.
Switch between shipping types without returning to the app menu
A navigation bar lets shippers move between shipping types directly, without returning to Inxeption's platform-wide app menu. Within each shipping app, a sidebar gave quick access to Track, Quotes, and Shipments, and every app opened on a Track landing page with an at-a-glance view of active shipments, their status, origin, and destination.
Truckload shipping app: existing functionality in a clearer interface
Launched first, it set the pattern the other shipping apps followed.
International shipping app: quoting and booking added
The International shipping app added quoting and booking where Inxeption's platform had only supported tracking. Shippers could request quotes and book both full-container and partial-container shipments, then track them in the same place.
Results
Shipping became the first of Inxeption's standalone apps
Four focused apps replaced a buried, hard-to-navigate experience, each reachable from the platform-wide app menu.
Reflection
I wasn't just solving for one app
The Truckload Shipping app was the first one I designed, before we knew what the platform-wide frame around it would look like. When the frame arrived, the colors and some details shifted, and I adapted the design to fit. That taught me to design each piece as groundwork others would iterate on.
