CASE STUDY DRAFT / PLACEHOLDER CONTENT
Making a construction-supply app keep its delivery promise
Product Designer · RenoRun
TL;DR
RenoRun promised contractors building materials “exactly when you need them,” but late and split deliveries were common and the app never warned anyone. I led the redesign of the purchase journey across four shipped iterations: surfacing delivery estimates on every item, making split shipments visible, moving the delivery decision to the start of the journey, and letting contractors consolidate shipments through a rebuilt checkout. Results: 25% fewer late deliveries, 39% fewer complaint calls to CS, 27% lower operations cost from bundled shipments, and 12% more orders placed through the app instead of Sales and CS.
Problem framing
For a contractor, a missing box of screws can idle a whole crew. RenoRun’s brand was built on fast, reliable delivery, but fulfilment depended heavily on Ops and immature inventory systems, and late deliveries were alarmingly common. None of that showed up in the app. Not one key screen, from homepage to post-purchase, mentioned possible delays or split shipments. Contractors picked a date and timeslot at the very end of checkout and found out about problems when the truck didn’t arrive. The result was frustrated customers, reimbursements, CS overload and very low retention. For the business, this was a reputation problem in a word-of-mouth industry, and a barrier to moving the roughly 75% of sales that still went through human agents into the app.
Constraints & trade-offs
* Estimates, not guarantees. Our fulfilment platform couldn’t reserve inventory until the point of purchase, so delivery dates had to be presented as honest best guesses. * Real-world logistics. Orders came from multiple warehouses, with truck weight and volume limits and out-of-zone delivery rules. * Two sales channels. Most orders went through CS and Sales, so the app had to match the behaviour of their internal tools. * Hard-to-reach users. Contractors rarely step off site, which made traditional research difficult. * Parallel foundations. A new design system was being built at the same time, and the bottom navigation needed a WCAG-driven redesign.
Research insights that changed decisions
Over an 8-week campaign we interviewed 20 contractors on their job sites, ranging from 2 to 15+ orders, and sat in with CS and Sales. The key finding: broken expectations hurt more than late trucks. One long-time customer told us he knew his orders wouldn’t all arrive together; he just wanted to know when, and how many shipments to expect. That shifted the project from trying to make every delivery on time to telling contractors the truth as early as possible, and giving them control over how their order arrives.
Solution
Add the final approach, key interactions, and annotated process visuals. Explain how the design addressed the problem.
Process visual placeholder / Flow, iteration, or annotated solution
efawdfw
Aefdfef
Outcomes / impact
* 25% fewer late deliveries * 39% fewer CS complaint calls about late orders * 27% lower operations cost from bundled shipments * 12% more orders placed through the app instead of CS and Sales * 10% more customers reaching 4+ orders * 8% less spent on reimbursements and credits I led design across all four iterations, from research through the SLA and split-shipment logic to the final checkout.
My Final Thoughts
This project changed how I think about trust. We couldn’t make every truck arrive on time, but we could stop surprising people, and that turned out to matter more. The biggest gains came from telling contractors the truth earlier, before any of the logistics changed. It also showed me the value of shipping in slices. No single release solved the problem. Each one taught us something the next one built on: item estimates showed we needed order-level visibility, which showed we needed to ask for the date first, which made consolidation possible. If I’d tried to design the final checkout on day one, I would have gotten it wrong. Finally, the best design decisions here weren’t on screens. Mapping SLA and split-shipment logic with Ops, and sitting in with CS and Sales, is what made the interface honest. Good design for a service like this starts with understanding how the service actually works.