Meridian
Type
Product Design (Concept Study)
Focus
IA & Operational UX
Timeline
2026
Overview
Meridian is a control tower dashboard for logistics operations teams who need to move from "is the network healthy?" to "where is this specific shipment, right now?", without losing their place in between. It’s designed around a hierarchy that mirrors how logistics teams actually organize: network → region → distribution center → carrier → shipment.
Problem
Most logistics teams aren’t short on data, they’re just spread across too many tools that don’t talk to each other: carrier portals, spreadsheets, email alerts. By the time someone notices a shipment in trouble, it’s often too late to do anything about it.
A few numbers on this:
69%
of companies report they lack complete visibility across their supply chain
Business Continuity Institute
37%
lose track of shipments once they’re in transit
Tive, State of Visibility 2025
45%
only discover cargo damage after delivery, after it’s too late to act
Tive
Research
The easy answer is “add more dashboards.” I don’t believe that’s the problem. Most large logistics operators already have plenty of data: GPS pings, carrier updates, sensor feeds. What they’re missing is a way to tell which piece of data matters right now.
Gartner found companies with strong real-time visibility are 2.5x more likely to be high-performing. But visibility alone doesn’t close the gap: McKinsey’s 2024 supply chain survey found it still takes the average company about two weeks to respond once a disruption is identified. That gap, between spotting a problem and acting on it, is what shaped the rest of this project.
Goals
(An exception here means any shipment that has missed, or is about to miss, its delivery deadline, shown throughout the product as SLA, short for service-level agreement, the contracted delivery window.)
01
Shrink detection-to-action time.
An exception shouldn’t wait to be discovered; it should surface to the right level of the hierarchy automatically.
02
Preserve context across every drill-down.
A user investigating a single shipment should never lose track of which region or DC (Distribution Center) they came from.
Mapping the Hierarchy
Before sketching any screens, I mapped how a logistics organization actually thinks about its network: Network → Region → Distribution Center → Carrier → Shipment. Every screen had to trace back to that same structure.
The harder part was figuring out how exception state should move through it. A delayed shipment can’t be invisible at the network level, but it shouldn’t be shouting at every level either. A VP needs to know “3 regions have active exceptions,” not the shipment number.
What Didn’t Work First
Push notifications were the obvious first instinct: ping the assigned manager the moment a shipment crosses into exception status. I considered it, then reasoned my way out of it: a DC having a rough afternoon could fire off a dozen notifications in ten minutes, and the fastest way to get an app muted entirely is to make it interrupt people that often. So the system doesn’t push anything at all. It only tells you what’s happening when you’re actually looking at it. Exceptions surface in the badges and counts the moment you open the dashboard, not through an alert that can pile up and get ignored.
Map vs. List
Dashboards like this default to maps pretty reflexively. I sketched out a map-first version early in the concept, then moved away from it: an ops manager’s first question isn’t “where is everything,” it’s “what needs my attention.” Geography doesn’t track with urgency. A shipment two miles from its destination can be more at-risk than one three states away if it’s about to miss a delivery window. So the landing view became a severity-sorted list instead, with the map moved to a secondary, opt-in view.
Network Overview
Answers the first question first. Regions with active exceptions get visually promoted, while healthy ones fade back.
UI: top-level dashboard; regional health scores, aggregated exception counts, network-wide KPI strip
Exception Queue & Drill-Down
Clicking into a problem never costs you your place in the hierarchy. It drills the same breadcrumb down a level instead of opening a new page.
UI: severity-sorted queue + breadcrumb navigation from Region → DC → Carrier → Shipment
Shipment & Carrier Detail
Puts everything actionable on one screen: how far past SLA a shipment is, the carrier’s track record, and a direct action.
UI: shipment record; status timeline, SLA countdown, carrier reliability scorecard
Accessibility & System Rigor
Enterprise logistics tools are used on high-glare warehouse floor monitors and under high-stress operational conditions. Designing strictly for visual aesthetics fails when real-world conditions hit. I audited the color palette and interaction states to guarantee full accessibility without compromising data density.
WCAG AA/AAA Contrast Auditing: Audited background surfaces (#16233A) against foreground text and status elements. Primary metrics and critical alert text (#SH-4483) maintain a minimum 14.08:1 contrast ratio, ensuring immediate legibility across varied display calibrations.
Multi-Signaling (Non-Color Dependency): Color is never used as the sole indicator of urgency. To support users with protanopia or deuteranopia, exception levels combine color status dots with explicit numerical time deltas (-2h, 45m, 1.2h) and clear status badges (Delayed · 2h past SLA).
UI: WCAG AAA contrast standards + multi-signaling SLA statuses + focus states
Retrospective
The hardest part of this project wasn’t any single screen, it was making sure the hierarchy held together everywhere. It’s easy to design each screen as its own separate problem. It’s harder to make sure they all still connect back to the same underlying structure. This project also taught me the domain itself, not just the interface. I didn’t know how delivery systems actually worked going in, what counted as an exception, or what an SLA even meant in practice. Digging into how logistics operations teams actually think about their network is what shaped the whole hierarchy and badge system, not something I could have designed my way into without understanding it first. If I kept working on this, I’d focus on catching problems earlier, flagging a shipment before it actually misses its delivery deadline, not after. That’s where the industry seems to be headed: Gartner expects 60% of supply chain disruptions to be resolved without a person even getting involved by 2031. The next step here would be a system that suggests what to do about a problem, not just tells you one exists.