Gemma Gallagher - Last Mile Delivery

Last Mile Delivery

The Last Mile Delivery project at The Dock is proposing to create a flexible delivery framework that enables postal and logistic providers to deliver parcels locally in a fast and efficient manner thereby making the process more cost effective for customers, retailers and postal companies.

To comply with my confidentiality agreement I have omitted and appropriated confidential information. The project name and any designs shown are a reinterpretation of the original.

My Role

Service, Interaction & Data Design

Services

Design Research, Service Design, Data Design, System Behaviour, Interaction Design, Data Mapping, Storytelling, Client Engagement

What we're doing

Our goal is to utilize predictive analytics and machine learning to create a flexible delivery framework that combines the scale and reliability of traditional delivery methods with the flexibility and dynamism of new models in a way that meets customer expectations while remaining cost effective. To demonstrate the viability of our solution we will run a live Proof of Concept with an Accenture client.

Our Process

The interdisciplinary team conists of 30 people which is made up of Designers, Advanced Analytics, Software Engineers, and Business Strategy. We are currently in the Explore and Validate phase. Our focus is on the Service and Interaction design challenges that come with operationalising this technology solution. Our work to date has involved research to explore the postal ecosystem and operations to understand how our solution will impact the ecosystem and users involved in the current process. We have conducted this research with national US and Irish postal organisations. We are currently developing an functional MVP to test and pilot with a client. My role to date has involved:

Planning and conducting exploratory research in Ireland and the US.
Explaining and communicating the complex analytical solutions to potential clients and end users.
Link between pillars to ensure knowledge and understanding of complex technologies is translated and communicated through the design and development on the Command Centre UX/UI. As part of this, I have been trialed new methods for mapping data requirements and flows for Service and UX activities.
UX design for Command Centre application, focusing on the balance and impact of interactions between the system and user.

I have also been involved in client activites and engagement workshops. As part of this, myself and our data designer developed an interactive demo and activity to explain our solution and ideate around it capabilities for the specific clients needs.

Outcomes and Learnings to date

The project has been running since February 2018 and is still ongoing. We are currently developing an MVP which consists of an Operations Command Centre and a Delivery Driver App. We aim to run a fully operational pilot in January 2019 to test the validity of the core analytics solution and the wider adoption and operational challenges.

We have had some challenges and blockers around access to end users to date which has hindered our user research and testing. We adjusted our plan to reflect this and focused on shaping and building the interaction with the AI system which we can now test with a greater level of understanding and in more detail with end users. As it is in an early protoype, we envisage some adoption issues which we will address in the next phase.