Context
Cold storage logistics is a sector where failures are measured not just in operational cost, but in product spoilage, food safety violations, and regulatory penalties. The operators managing these facilities — tracking temperatures across dozens of storage units, coordinating teams of workers, maintaining compliance documentation — were doing most of it manually or with tools never designed for the job.
I was brought in as a freelance Senior Product Designer to design a mobile application from scratch for a cold storage logistics client in South Korea. The scope covered the full design process: discovery, definition, ideation, and final UI — from user research to handoff-ready screens.
4
User roles designed for
Host, Operator, Supporter, Guest
6
Core feature areas
3 months
Research to handoff
The Problem
Three Critical Failures
Stakeholder interviews with cold storage operators and quality control officers surfaced three core pain points that were causing real operational damage:
- High spoilage rates from temperature deviations that weren't caught in time — manual logging created gaps in monitoring coverage
- Workflow bottlenecks causing task completion delays — no central system for assigning, tracking, or communicating about tasks across teams
- Compliance failures from poor documentation — regulatory audits required temperature logs and handling records that teams couldn't reliably produce
"Every degree of temperature deviation we miss is product we lose. And right now, we're finding out about deviations hours after they happen — if we find out at all."
What Teams Needed
- Real-time temperature monitoring with alerts — not periodic manual logs
- A unified workspace for task assignment, communication, and status tracking
- Package tracking tied to camera-based scanning, not manual entry
- A compliance documentation trail that built itself from daily operations
Design Process
Discover
I conducted stakeholder interviews with cold storage operators, quality control officers, and logistics coordinators to map their daily workflows in detail. The goal was to understand not just what they needed, but how they thought about their work — the mental models that would shape how features needed to be organized and named.
Define
With research data in hand, I mapped user journeys for each of the four roles — Host, Operator, Supporter, and Guest — and defined the system requirements. A critical decision at this stage was designing a multi-role permission model that gave each user type exactly the access they needed without overwhelming them with irrelevant features.
Design process — Discover, Define, Ideate, Design
Ideate & Design
I built wireframes for each primary workflow before moving to high-fidelity screens, using visual status indicators throughout — color-coded temperature states, alert severity levels, package scan confirmations — to support fast decision-making in a high-stakes operational environment.
Key Features
Key screens — Place List, Package tracking, Workboard, Temperature monitoring
Place List — Location Management
A filterable list of all cold storage locations with real-time status indicators for each. Operators could see at a glance which units were within safe temperature ranges, which were approaching alert thresholds, and which required immediate attention — without opening each location individually.
Package List with Camera Scanning
Package tracking tied to camera-based ID scanning — eliminating manual entry and the transcription errors that came with it. Each package record included its full temperature history for the duration of its time in storage, available for compliance review at any time.
Workboard — Task & Communication Hub
A centralised workspace where tasks were assigned, tracked, and communicated. This replaced the ad-hoc combination of phone calls, paper notes, and messaging apps that teams were using to coordinate. Status updates flowed automatically from completed package scans and temperature checks into the workboard record.
Temperature Monitoring with Trend Analysis
Real-time temperature logging with graphical trend displays for each storage unit. Alert thresholds were configurable by product type, and notifications fired immediately when a deviation was detected — not at the next scheduled check.
Multi-Role User System
Four distinct permission levels — Host, Operator, Supporter, Guest — each with a tailored interface showing only the features relevant to their role. A host managing multiple facilities saw a different primary view from an operator running the floor of a single unit.
Outcomes
Complete screen set — delivered to engineering handoff-ready
The application delivered what cold storage operators had been missing: a continuous operational view that replaced periodic manual processes with real-time intelligence. The camera-based scanning eliminated transcription errors from package intake. The workboard gave team leads visibility into task completion without requiring check-in calls.
Most importantly, the compliance documentation trail built itself from daily operations — meaning audit preparation, previously a manual multi-day effort, became a matter of running a report.
- Streamlined operational workflows across all four user roles
- Real-time temperature monitoring replaced periodic manual logging
- Regulatory compliance documentation generated automatically from daily operations
- Camera scanning eliminated manual transcription for package management