Mateus • Design
Amsterdam —

Vale TruckFlow

Getting a truck through a port with no signal.

Role
User research, interaction design, visual design
Year
2016

Every day, hundreds of trucks move through Vale’s port in Tubarão, Vitória — some bringing cargo in, some taking it out, all weighed twice at whichever of three scales is free. None of the drivers work for Vale, and most scales barely held a 3G signal.

Three days on site with Filipe Baeta, Luísa Nogueira and Ubirajara Junior: interviews, sketches, and a scale operator who hadn’t seen half of what was going on inside his own port.

What we ended up shipping: a kanban board, one column per stage.

The port

The port is enormous, and its size is the whole problem. Operators aren’t just weighing trucks — they’re tracking where every one of them is, inside a site too big to see across, with no system to help.

Aerial black-and-white photo of Vale’s port in Tubarão, showing its gates, scales and loading piers.
Tubarão, from above: five gates, three scales, no way to see all of it at once.

Day 1

Talking to everyone

We opened with stakeholders: everyone with a stake in the process, one room, a whiteboard, no shortage of post-its. Luísa ran the conversation; I wrote down whatever stuck.

Then we went to the first scale, to watch an operator’s day instead of hearing about it. The finding had nothing to do with a screen: some scales sat too far from any tower to get a 3G signal at all.

The stakeholder workshop: people around a table with a projector and post-it collages on the wall behind them.
The room. Noisy, and full of post-its.
A hand-drawn process map on a flip chart, with two people looking on.
Mapping it by hand — no point sketching a screen before that.

Their system gave no eagle’s-eye view of any of it: where trucks were, who was waiting, what they were carrying. Talking to a driver usually meant leaving the desk to do it in person.

Six pain points named by stakeholders: theft of goods, difficulty communicating with drivers, loss of goods, lack of visibility of truck travel and deliveries, loading the wrong product, and lack of visibility of entrances and exits.
Theft, lost cargo, wrong loads, and no visibility into any of it — named unprompted, by the people living with it.
Four roles in the process: scale operator, truck driver, loader operator and planner, each with a short description of their responsibilities.
Four people, four jobs. Only one of them a Vale employee.
A flow diagram of the scale operator’s day, from arriving at their shift to logging issues at the end of it, ending on an unhappy note.
The operator’s day — fine until the queue builds and nobody can be repositioned without leaving the post to say so.

Day 2

Truck drivers

Day two, we talked to the drivers themselves, morning and late into the night, when the ones who’d travelled far were still waiting their turn. Two groups fell out of it: people who’d come hundreds of kilometres, some for the first time, and locals who made the run more than twice a day.

Three men smiling in front of a truck at the port.
The regulars, in and out of the port more than twice a day.
A group of men sitting around an improvised table at night, mid-conversation.
The ones who’d come from far, still waiting it out at night.
A flow diagram of a truck driver’s day, from arrival through two weighings, with three points flagged as blind spots for operators.
The driver’s day. Operators lost sight of it three separate times.

The proposal

The workshop’s usual answer is an app. Here it would have been the wrong one, for two reasons.

  • Most of the scales had close to no 3G. Some had none at all.
  • These drivers didn’t work for Vale. Asking them to download something before they could get paid puts the cost on the wrong side of the relationship.

So the answer was SMS: registering a truck opened a digital line, a queue run by text message, one instruction at a time, answered “OK” to advance or “Help” to flag a problem. The operator got a kanban board — the whole line, visible without leaving the desk. Sketched day two, mocked up by day three.

The SMS conversation flow, from a truck driver registering to being weighed, loaded, wrapped, weighed again and sent off.
The whole script, gate to exit: “Welcome to Vale” to “Have a nice trip.”

Day 3

Tests

We tested the SMS flow by hand first, sending the messages ourselves, following the flowchart, watching whether a driver understood each one without help.

The dashboard

It ran on a desktop and mirrored onto a TV, so the whole workstation could see it, not just whoever sat at the keyboard. Every stage had its own column, so nobody scrolled sideways, and a colour flag showed what a truck carried at a glance.

The dashboard: five columns (Fila, Pesagem, Operação, Re-pesagem, Saída), each holding cards for the trucks currently in that stage, colour standing in for cargo.

Click a truck’s card and you got its whole file: driver, destination, paperwork, and a button to move it on without leaving your seat.

The dashboard with a truck’s card expanded, showing the driver’s details, destination, paperwork, and the message the driver had just been sent, with an action to move it to the next stage.
A close-up of a truck’s expanded record, showing CPF, RG, city, postcode and destination fields. The record behind a card, one tap away.
A truck’s card lifted above the stack with a drop shadow on hover, so the queue still feels alive under the cursor.

We showed it to the operators and stakeholders that same afternoon. They were pleased with it.

Takeaways

The answer is out there

Working this from an office, we’d never have found the real problem: a scale with no signal at all isn’t something you learn secondhand. Being where the trucks were was the only way to catch it.

Design without a screen

What we shipped to drivers wasn’t a UI, it was a script: the exact words someone would read on whatever phone, with whatever signal, that scale got. Getting those words right mattered more than any pixel, and there were no pixels to hide behind if they were wrong.

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