DP World partnered with Community Network Services (CNS) to create a unified Vehicle Bookings System (VBS), which allows Transport Operators (Hauliers) to book shipping containers onto trucks that arrive/depart from the terminal. Currently, CNS are the technology partner for DP World ports in Southampton and London Gateway.

Prior to the project kick-off, DP World Southampton and DP World London Gateway were using two different platforms for transporters to book time slots for their trucks. These systems utilized two separate tech stacks, managed by CNS, as well as features that were exclusive to each location.

Having been in circulation for over 15+ years, it was considered a flagship product for Vehicle Bookings across UK Port Authority, with non-DP World ports attempting to adopt a similar system.

We considered this platform to be a benchmark for success, and were tasked to improve the user experience, while keeping any new training for port operators to a minimum.

We delivered a fully optimized product, given the requirements from both ports, while gathering Haulier & Transporters pain points from focus groups, contextual inquiry and usability testing sessions.

The adoption of Design Thinking into their product strategy kicked off the scope to build an in-house Design team at DP World.

The DP World Design Team, with a remote Development Lab in their internal Center of Excellence, have helped launch their Vehicle Bookings System in over 10+ ports around the world.

CNS have been the technical partner for port operations across the UK, including DP World ports such as Southampton and London Gateway.

To further their partnership, CNS want to provide a central Vehicle Booking System (VBS) for their two highest operating ports, rather than maintain two separate products with different functionality, code bases and integrations.

We added value to CNS by engaging with some of the end users of the current VBS. This presented CNS as a ‘’customer-centric’ partner, who wanted to understand the key pain points of the current products. We wanted to understand opportunities for improvement, as well as any functional redundancies.

The centralised VBS would be able to satisfy the functions required at two ports with different operations. The goal was to create a hybrid experience across both terminals, while integrating with their respective terminal operating systems.

To further a partnership with hauliers, port authority and DP World, we wanted to provide a central Vehicle Booking System (VBS) for their two highest operating ports, rather than maintain two separate products with different functionality, code bases and integrations.

By engaging with some of the end users of the current VBS, we were presented as a ‘’customer-centric’ partner, who wanted to understand the key pain points of the current products, and mapping them to an end-to-end customer journey. With this, we were able to understand opportunities for improvement, as well as any functional redundancies.

We created wireframes using Figma, with suggested improvements and built a prototype to use for testing.

Each test had two members; one person asking questions and one person taking notes and further observations.

We used a script as a guide on what we should cover and how much time we had available.

We used Lookback to record each inquiry session and testing round from our Figma prototype. Using Lookback helped us record each session and capture the way hauliers used our prototype.

Our strategy for testing was to assess the functionality of:

• Registering Shipping Containers
• Searching & Filtering
• Viewing Container Details
• Creating bookings
• Amending bookings

Click here to view a recorded segment from our Usability Testing sessions with UK Hauliers

After six months of design critiques, stakeholder demos and usability testing, we delivered designs for a VBS that could be used and managed at two DP World ports in the United Kingdom, while following consistently designing, testing and iterating.

The feedback from usability testing resulted in 15% of initial requirements becoming redundant. We also created a stronger feedback connections with port operators and VBS end users.

The VBS is the first live implementation of our DP World Design System. It is currently being used today at DP World Southampton and DP World London Gateway.

For multiple services of the DP World Port Community System, we created a Design System for DP World & their CARGOES Community Platform, that housed the Vehicle Bookings service and 7+ other Port Authority services.

We created an environment for clean designs and developed with clean code. This allows us to have a consistent experience and efficient development.

Utilising this system across services allowed an increased turnaround of design and time to market.

Working with development teams has increased our collaboration, knowledge-sharing and strengthened our documentation in Zeroheight.