ROLE: Lead UX Designer

Duties: Field research, stakeholder alignment, interaction design, user flows, UI handoff

PROBLEM

NAPA's delivery operation ran on paper and tribal knowledge. Drivers carried clipboards. Dispatchers managed physical boards of keys and invoices. Once a truck left the lot, the dispatcher had zero visibility until it came back.

The business goal was digitization. The real problem was the user. Drivers were often retirees or part-timers who'd been running the same routes for years. The paper worked for them. Any tool that added steps, required attention, or felt like surveillance was going to get set on the seat and ignored.

RESEARCH

I started with ride-alongs. Drivers were juggling coffee, keys, and a clipboard while running routes they'd memorized stop by stop. The paper manifest was mostly a formality. The real route lived in their heads, including which delivery bays had broken buzzers and which customers only showed up after 10am. None of that was written down anywhere.

Dispatchers had a different problem. Once a truck left, they had nothing. If a priority customer called asking where their part was, the dispatcher had to call the driver, which drivers hated, or guess. They called it the black hole.

THE PIVOT

The original brief called for a delivery management app where drivers logged every step. Arrived. Unloading. Signed. Departed. After the first week of research it was clear that wasn't going to survive contact with the actual users.

The harder conversation was with stakeholders. Those manual input fields were tied to reporting requirements. Cutting them meant going back to leadership and explaining that a tool with zero adoption produces zero data worth having. We moved from a data input model to a background utility. Passive tracking. Automated status updates. Minimal required interaction from the driver.

HARD DECISIONS

Stakeholders wanted continuous location tracking for efficiency. Research said drivers who felt watched would reject the tool entirely. The compromise was contextual tracking, active only during a route, and visible to the driver on their own screen. They could see what was being shared and when it stopped. That transparency held the adoption together in a user population with strong reasons to distrust new technology.

The first prototype was also map-first, assuming drivers would want something familiar from consumer apps. It failed immediately. These drivers knew their areas cold. What they needed was the manifest, confirmation that the right parts were in the truck for the right stops. We flipped the hierarchy and moved to a context-aware single card. Driving meant next stop details. Arrived meant scan button, front and center. The driver never had to decide what to do next.

OUTCOME

Dispatchers got real-time visibility into driver status during active routes. The black hole closed. Drivers described the tool as easier than the clipboard, not because it had more features, but because it had fewer decisions. Automated status updates reduced the check-in calls drivers had always hated. The tool that was supposed to increase management visibility ended up reducing the most intrusive form of it.

WHAT I'D DO DIFFERENTLY

We researched dispatchers and drivers separately. That was a mistake. Getting them in the same room earlier would have surfaced their conflicting mental models before the first prototype review instead of during it.