Carrier 360

At a Glance

Overview

Carrier 360 is J.B. Hunt's core mobile marketplace connecting carriers and shippers across North America. It's the primary operational tool for tens of thousands of drivers managing real-time load discovery, booking, execution, and payment — at a scale that makes every UX decision a business decision.

I joined as Senior UX Designer leading mobile product design at the launch of the platform's third major version and spent six years evolving the experience across multiple releases. The work spanned the full carrier workflow: finding loads, booking freight, managing shipments in the field, uploading documents, submitting check calls, and getting paid — all from a phone, between stops, under real operational conditions.

The Platform

Carrier 360 serves a specific, demanding user: professional drivers and fleet operators running a business in the field. The product has to work reliably between stops, under time pressure, across every load type and route configuration in North America.

The core workflow covers the complete load lifecycle:

• Load discovery — searching, filtering, and evaluating available freight
• Booking — instant booking or negotiated offers in-app
• Execution — check calls, status updates, and detention management without phone calls
• Documentation and payment — document upload via phone camera, electronic invoice creation, and Quick Pay within 2 days

Each stage has distinct information needs. A driver evaluating a load needs rate, route, and equipment details. A driver executing a delivery needs stop sequence, appointment windows, and check call status. Designing for this lifecycle — rather than treating the app as a single flat experience — was the central UX challenge of the engagement.

Key UX Decisions

Load board and filtering as the primary freight discovery surface

Freight matching is a complex filtering problem — drivers need to match by location, route, equipment type, distance, rate, and appointment constraints simultaneously. The load board was redesigned as the primary surface with a first-class filtering system and Favorites saved search capability. Drivers can surface relevant loads quickly and save frequently used search parameters rather than rebuilding them each session.

Lifecycle-based load card architecture

Load cards were redesigned to surface contextual, stage-relevant information rather than presenting a fixed set of fields regardless of where a driver was in the workflow. The card adapts to the lifecycle stage — discovery, booked, in transit, delivered — showing what matters now rather than everything at once. This reduced cognitive load in high-density workflows and improved decision clarity at each stage.

Detention and document management

Two historically phone-dependent workflows — detention charging and document submission — were brought into the app. Detention is now tracked automatically with location services. Documents are captured via phone camera and uploaded in-app. Both eliminate calls that pulled drivers out of their workflow and introduced friction at critical moments in load execution.

Check call submission

Status updates were redesigned as a structured, step-guided flow tied to specific stops and appointment windows. The form surfaces the relevant stop details — location, appointment time, expected arrival — and guides the driver through a single focused step rather than a generic free-form update.

Incremental modernization

Six years of improvements didn't ship as a single redesign. Each change was scoped, sequenced, and aligned to engineering constraints and executive roadmap priorities at a Fortune 500 company. This approach preserved platform stability while continuously raising the experience quality across one of J.B. Hunt's most revenue-critical products.

Enterprise Design System

Running parallel to the Carrier 360 work, I co-led a CIO-sponsored enterprise design system initiative covering the broader J.B. Hunt product ecosystem.

• Directed 4–5 dedicated designers and partnered with principal engineering leadership
• Built governance supporting 50+ designers across 30+ web and mobile products
• Drove 70%+ adoption across web applications
• Conducted a comprehensive mobile audit identifying a <10% mobile adoption baseline and documenting critical implementation gaps
• Served as primary design authority for standards enforcement and executive cross-product reviews

The mobile audit directly informed the roadmap for bringing Carrier 360 and other mobile products into alignment with the enterprise system.

Strategic Navigation Initiative

Selected as mobile design lead for a CIO-sponsored navigation initiative developed in partnership with Google. Defined core UX flows and contributed to cross-company product discussions before organizational reprioritization halted the launch.

Results

• Six years of mobile product leadership across multiple major releases at Fortune 500 scale — serving as the carrier-facing mobile interface for a digital freight marketplace that scaled from approximately $150M to over $1.5B in annual transactions during the engagement
• Lifecycle-based load card architecture shipped — reducing cognitive load and improving decision clarity across the full carrier workflow
• Search, filtering, and Favorites redesigned as the primary freight discovery surface for 175,000+ carriers
• Detention and document workflows moved in-app — eliminating phone-dependent friction from load execution
• Enterprise design system governance established across 30+ products with 70%+ web adoption
• Mobile adoption gap identified and documented — creating the roadmap for future mobile system alignment

What I'd Measure Next

• Load booking rate by filter usage — do drivers who use saved Favorites book at a higher rate? This is the signal for whether the search architecture is actually working
• Time-to-book — from load board open to confirmed booking, across lifecycle card versions
• Detention auto-capture rate — what percentage of eligible detention events are captured automatically versus requiring manual intervention?
• Document upload completion rate — does in-app upload complete successfully or do drivers abandon and fall back to other methods?
• Mobile design system adoption — the audit established a <10% baseline; tracking adoption across subsequent releases quantifies the governance work

Reflections

Six years on a single product teaches you things a series of shorter engagements can't. The most important lesson from Carrier 360: the highest-impact UX decisions are often the ones that reduce what a driver has to think about, not the ones that add new capabilities.

Every workflow that came off the phone and into the app — detention, documents, check calls — was a decision made by a driver who was already managing a complex operational environment. The job wasn't to make the app more powerful. It was to make the parts that mattered most invisible in their simplicity.

Doing that at Fortune 500 scale, across multiple release cycles, with executive visibility on every major decision — that's a different kind of design problem than shipping features fast. It's systems thinking applied to an organization as much as to a product.