Move forward. Faster & smarter.
An omnichannel Experience Transformation & brand strategy refresh for Forward.
Forward needed help consolidating multiple brands, over a dozen websites, and disparate lines of business into a single, holistic freight service offering.
My team began by conducting exhaustive stakeholder and customer surveys to identify opportunities of digital transformation and customer experience improvement. We followed this effort up with a thorough customer journey and service map, revealing how the organization could deliver of these and other customer-experience initiatives.
The next-generation website our strategy and tactics defined for them shakes up the logistics industry with incomparable branding, visual design, usability, and messaging informed thorough rigorous market analysis, usability research, and customer insights. It also uses targeted messaging to grow the business and capture leads while educating new customers with powerful pre-login tools—all designed to utilize best-in-class content-management and digital asset management platforms.
Client
Forward Air
Role
Design Director
Key services
Brand strategy
Product strategy
User & business research
Project team
Product strategists
UX designers
UI designers
Front-end developers
Brand designers
Project budget
$2,000,000+
Project timeline
Nine months
Our design process.
Our team tackled Forward’s challenge with a game-changing process we call Experience Transformation.
Experience Transformation is a tested and repeatable process I’ve developed across multiple agencies and clients that elevates both the user’s experience and the business’ results through the rigorous application of design-thinking principles and an omnichannel approach to tactical execution.
It’s pretty cool.
This process aims to do more than simply improve the usability or desirability of a solution. Through empathy and analysis, we elicit the most valuable user and stakeholder data. And by creatively prioritizing these validated user needs within existing technical or business constraints, we’ve time and time again elevated solutions to a level of indispensability that have dramatic impacts on how businesses are able to meet and exceed user needs.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs informs how we look at product health and market potential. Typically, this hierarchy caps out with “overdelivery” (or some synonym). But our point of view is that there’s further room to climb beyond simple innovation or disruption. That if you let user needs lead and adapt your business and requirements to suit, your business may reach that rarest of peaks—indispensability.
Designers are. experts in a process. And this process works for nearly any client in any industry to solve for any problem: exploring both business and user needs to clarify the competitive space, validating requirements, defining success metrics, and facilitating a shared vision of an innovative solution at both strategic (high) and tactical (low) levels. Experience Transformation combines activities, their inputs, their outputs, and their relevant RACI roles (who’s responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed) and organizes them into seven discrete stages which can easily be divided among the team and into agile-ish sprints.
Service map analysis & critical customer decision points.
Service maps and multiple personae segments (examples below) were assembled from 31 customer interviews and 51 stakeholder interviews by a team of three designers over the course of twelve weeks.
An integrated across all lines of business from the aggregated service companies, assembled to determine the points of most valuable customer contact.
User personae included both internal and external segments, focusing on their digital savvy,
Personae scenarios focused on opportunities to engage with both existing and new customers as they relate to Forward’s consolidated services.
Personae contextualized user by goals (opportunities), frustrations (pain points), and how best we can engage.
Product strategy.
A comprehensive product strategy—derived from the identified critical customer decision points—included tactical business KPIs and customer-conversion priorities as part of a consolidated solution.
User and stakeholder research identified six user requirement categories.
User and stakeholder research identified five critical customer decision points.
Content strategy rationale and guidelines.
Tactical goals and KPI definitions.
Customer decision points informed tactical recommendations on a six point customer conversion journey.
User interface variations were explored in parallel to the evolving brand refresh.
Brand strategy.
Our brand strategy brought all the business and service lines together under a unified umbrella, including abstract guidelines and tactical implementations put into immediate use.
A unified design system.
Brand and functional color palettes.
Isometric, flat, and stroke iconography designed to service a variety of interactions and uses.
A robust presentation system was created to service the other initial point of customer contact: Sale presentations.
Interactive brand implementation needs were included to support client-side creatives.
Functional implementations of the brand were considered at every level.
Our designed solution in execution.
Our cross-functional agency-and-client product team brought our solution to life using an agile cadence that involved UX, UI, content, and front-end resources on a rolling-engagement and atomic-design basis.
A detailed site map using custom UI cards helped align technical and non-technical stakeholders and partners.
