IndustrialLogistics0→1Sole UX

Fleet

Three tools and two forms, consolidated into one.

Sole UX lead on a 0→1 yard-management product at Ndustrial. The shipped pilot consolidated three software tools and two paper forms into a single yard-management interface, deployed at a cold-storage third-party-logistics facility tracking hybrid electric trailers.

Industrial conditions don't tolerate friction. Gloves on. Dust on the screen. Twelve trucks waiting on dock assignments. Every design decision was answerable to whether it survived the dock, not whether it looked clean in design review.

Three surfaces, one workflow

The hero screens, and the design intention behind each

Three hero surfaces carried the workflow. Each replaced a piece of the old way of doing things. Together they collapsed the jump-between-tools-and-clipboards model into a single screen the yard manager could run their dock from.

The yard management view was the operational center. An aerial map rendered every dock door and yard spot as a chip showing what was plugged in, plugged out, or empty. The trailer list on the left was searchable and sortable. Selecting any chip or list item opened a detail panel alongside the map: trailer ID, carrier, eTRU status, driver, and an audit log, all without losing the manager's sense of the whole yard.

Driver communication moved off radios and phone calls onto text-based messages inside the interface. Asynchronous, recordable, threaded against the trailer. Quick-action templates for the most common messages (load ready for check-out, return to front desk, await further instruction) handled the bulk of routine traffic with one tap.

Check-in was the consolidation made visible. What used to require three software tools and two paper forms became a single modal: pick a spot, confirm the eTRU status, done. When the yard was at capacity, the waitlist absorbed the overflow without breaking the main flow.

Consolidation, not aggregation.

Three software tools and two paper forms were not consolidated by bundling them into one screen. They were consolidated by deciding which jobs each had been doing, which jobs the new interface had to do, and which ones could disappear entirely because they had been workarounds in the first place.

Driver comms as text, not radio.

Radio works for one person speaking to one driver at a time, in real time, in their general direction. Text works for a yard manager handling twelve trucks in parallel. The change was not a UI choice. It was a choice about which job comms was supposed to do in this product.

Detail alongside the map, not a page away from it.

The trailer detail opens as a side panel, not as a navigation. The map stays visible the whole time. That decision keeps the yard manager oriented to the whole facility while drilling into one trailer, which matters because the next decision is almost never about the trailer in isolation. It's about how that trailer fits into the dock assignment, the waitlist, and the eight other trailers waiting their turn.

Three hero screens did the work of replacing three software tools and two paper forms. Each one named what the old way had been doing, what the new way was doing instead, and which job the user was actually trying to get done.

Sole UX, research through ship

What it took to design end-to-end for an industrial pilot

Sole UX at Ndustrial meant being the only UX resource at the company, not just on this project. Yard management was running in parallel with the Power Quality and Demand Response work for industrial customers, plus whatever else needed design judgment that week. Research, workflow design, visual design, prototypes, hand-off to engineering, pilot support: the work either happened or it didn't get done, across whichever project was loudest at the moment.

Research happened on the dock. The product was not designed in a conference room and shipped to operators to use. It was shaped by watching yard managers work, watching drivers wait, watching paperwork accumulate. The constraints (gloves, dust, time pressure) were not assumptions. They were observations from the people who were going to use the thing.

Industrial conditions shaped every design decision. Every minute spent in the interface was a minute not spent moving a truck, so cognitive load had to come down. The interface had to compete with paper, radios, and walking the dock, and lose less often than it won.

The pilot deployed at one facility. Not an enterprise rollout, not a category-wide product, not a broad-scale launch. One real customer site, with real yard managers running their actual dock through it. That is what 'shipped' meant in this case, and what made the work credible: the interface worked under the actual conditions where it would have to work.

Sole UX for the whole company, end to end.

I was the only UX resource at Ndustrial, owning the entire design function for the company while balancing the needs of multiple active projects in parallel. No design partner to defer to, no specialist to hand off to, and no other UX work happening anywhere else in the org that would have gotten done on its own. A different competency than leading a team, and worth claiming as a separate signal.

Research where the work happens.

User research at the customer site was not a methodology choice. It was the only way to know what the actual constraints were. The conditions a yard manager works under cannot be reproduced in an office, and assumptions that get past the conference room get caught on the dock.

Pilot scope as honest framing.

One facility shipping a real pilot is different from a category-wide rollout. Naming the scope (a single customer site, a single pilot) keeps the work credible and lets the reader trust the rest of the case. Overclaiming on scale undermines everything else the case is trying to say.

Industrial design judgment doesn't come from working on industrial products. It comes from being in the rooms where industrial work actually happens. The interface either survives those rooms or it doesn't.

What shipped

The pilot shipped during my tenure at Ndustrial. Yard managers at a cold-storage third-party-logistics facility ran their dock through it instead of jumping between three software tools and two paper forms. The broader Ndustrial program (including shore-power infrastructure for the hybrid electric trailers) continued after I was laid off in mid-2025.

The case here is not about scale. It is about whether an industrial product designed by one person, at one company, for one pilot site, can hold up in real industrial conditions. This one did.

Industrial design end-to-end means sole UX, research through ship, no specialists to hand off to, and an interface that either survives the dock or it doesn't.