Sustainable Urban Last Mile Solutions

In an elevator?

Then here’s the elevator pitch: In merely 10 days our product team managed to build a web app that allowed the Velove riders to request shifts and fill in their time reports, thus moving Velove’s daily business from Google sheets to their own brand new Rider’s app.

What came to be after that is a much bigger thing…

Background

Velove was formerly using Google Sheets and Google Forms to schedule riders to shifts in Stockholm and the riders would also do their time reports in Google Sheets.  Basically all their important data of riders, their productivity, salaries and so on was stored in Google Sheets.

Challenge

Due to summer holidays approaching there was a strict deadline and the Humblebee product team only had 10 days to build a web app for Velove’s riders that would include the functionality of requesting shifts and time reporting. During this time the team also started on a design system that would be used for all of Velove’s digital tools.

As the team had a very short time to develop the Riders App the process was quite different and many steps on exploring issues and needs were excluded. The goal was to move the scheduling and time reporting from the Google Sheets Velove currently were using to a progressive web app. The logic and the features were going to be the same with no real work on improving the existing structure and flow of scheduling and time reporting.

Solution

Design system
We created a design system so that we have one single source of truth for all designs that we work with across all Velove's products & services.

Admin
The backbone of Velove is the admin login that all the different types of Managers work from. In there they set up the different types of shifts, assign them to riders and monitor the riders progress on a personal level.

Riders app
We built a scheduling system based on GraphQL; open source API technology initially developed at Facebook. This system was and still is called the Rider’s App and is used by all of Velove’s riders in all of their hubs and cities.

Results

After the 10 day app our partnership with Velove blossomed, and we have continued to develop the design system as well as the Admin and Riders app. Going from a simple scheduling feature, the Humblebee product team have since: developed the Admin and Riders app to include automated scheduling and payments, built a rating system allowing for automated assignments, built an integrated bonus system connected to productivity and much more!

Focus has been on understanding the users and their needs, improving the structure of scheduling and time reporting. We have held countless Workshops to help prioritize new features to implement. A great advantage the team has had throughout the development of all digital tools at Velove is the close communication and interaction with users; both Velove riders and Velove Community managers who work with the recruitment, scheduling and salaries. This has helped us to identify and understand problems early on, receive feedback and be able to test new features before developing and finalizing them. The work on the design system and brand design continued and as Velove did not have a set design the team had the opportunity to explore and help them decide on what would work for them both as brand design in regards to business and also product design.