DispatchOne

Background

Almost ten years before working on ELD products, I collaborated with a former truck driver who wanted to build his own Transportation Management System (TMS).

At the time, I knew very little about the trucking industry.

What started as a design engagement quickly turned into a three-month immersion into fleet operations, dispatch workflows, safety management, accounting processes, driver management, and freight logistics.

Looking back, this project became my first real introduction to the transportation industry and laid much of the foundation that later helped me design ELD and compliance products.

The challenge

The goal was not to create another dashboard.

The goal was to translate years of operational trucking experience into software.

Unlike many software founders, the client had lived the problems himself.

He had worked as a driver, understood dispatch operations, interacted with brokers, managed paperwork, and experienced the daily inefficiencies of existing systems.

My role was to extract that operational knowledge and transform it into a structured product.

Discovery

For nearly three months we spent countless hours mapping how transportation businesses actually operate.

We explored:

• load management;
• dispatch workflows;
• broker interactions;
• driver onboarding;
• truck management;
• safety processes;
• accounting operations;
• document management;
• reporting requirements.

Many of these workflows existed only in conversations and experience rather than formal documentation.

The challenge was turning operational knowledge into a scalable software model.

User research

To better understand the market, we created user personas representing different transportation businesses.

The research included both fleet owners and owner-operators with different operational goals, financial constraints, and growth ambitions.

This helped us understand that a transportation platform must support organizations operating at very different scales while maintaining simplicity for everyday use.

Product design

Using Axure RP, I created:

• workflow diagrams;
• information architecture;
• user flows;
• low-fidelity prototypes;
• detailed interactive wireframes;
• administrative interfaces.

The system eventually included modules for:

• Dispatch
• Safety
• Accounting
• Reporting
• Driver Management
• Broker Management
• Equipment Management
• Maintenance Tracking
• Document Storage

Rather than focusing on visual design, most of the effort went into understanding business operations and structuring information in ways that matched how transportation companies actually worked.

Key learning

This project became my entry point into transportation technology.

Many concepts that later appeared in ELD systems were first encountered here:

• driver workflows;
• fleet management;
• safety operations;
• compliance processes;
• dispatch logic;
• operational reporting.

When I eventually joined Route One and began working on ELD products, I already understood many of the fundamental concepts because I had spent months mapping transportation operations years earlier.