Business Need

DHL, the world’s premier global delivery network, needed an online service to help their customers manage international shipments. Partnering with Open Harbor, they created a system that included landed cost calculation, destination comparison, legal compliance, and documentation assistance. The system made the power of sophisticated shipping software accessible to consumers on the DHL site.

Sliced Bread Design was brought in to design a flexible user interface that would allow customers to take advantage of the system’s complex feature set.

Strategy & Solution

After conducting phone user interviews with consumers, purchasing staff, and other business shippers, we designed an interface that reflects the users’ current international shipping processes. In order to create a compelling, accessible experience, we:

• Created a flexible interface that allowed users to choose between purchasing individual services and a bundle of services while maintaining a smooth flow
• Created a simple UI for easy cost comparison of shipping from multiple countries
• Designed an innovative wizard to dramatically simplify the process of selecting the international classification code for packages
• Improved the language used throughout the UI to eliminate shipping "mumbo jumbo"
• Proposed a strategy for customers to save records of their shipments over time and to see a history of orders and comparisons
• Applied the new DHL yellow and red branding to the wireframes