Failenn Aselta - Product Designer

Tetonic

livestock transit software for underwriting compliance and hauler load economics

Timeline

1 day

Role

Product Designer Frontend Engineer

Team

Failenn Aselta

Tools

HTML · CSS · JS

Interactive Prototype

Demo Tetonic

jump to the live suite

PROJECT OVERVIEW

What if livestock transit software treated compliance and cash as the same problem?

So I designed and coded Tetonic: three linked boards. Potential Shipping prices hauls as a range. Current Shipping tracks certificates, compliance, and claims. Bank Calculator maps a 30-day cash runway. Shared hauler COI is the spine. The live prototype is below.

A hauler opens the day's board

“Is this haul still insurable, still legal, still worth taking?”

Fragmented tools

DAT · COI · sheet

Load boardspot · dry van

RateLane$/miAge

$2,140AMA · GUY$2.184m

$1,890LBB · CVS$1.9412m

$2,420DHT · GCK$2.311h

COI portalVerified

Cash sheet.xls???

DueInBalRX-2247over$4,230

Spot rates. Badge COI. Cash in a spreadsheet.

Tetonic

press render

Why it matters

25-35

Baseline NPS, No Modern Tooling

(carriers w/o modern UX, industry avg)

29%

Cite Poor UX as a Barrier

(insurance portal users, MeasuringU)

75%

Want the Range, Not One Number

(carriers on posted-rate UI, Overdrive)

0 of 3

Boards Show a COI Countdown

(portals audited, none shows the clock)

Project goals

Validity

compliance decides claim validity

(old boards: status is a chip, not a signal)

Ranges

best-to-worst net, never a fake number

(old boards: one posted net, no range)

Parties

one COI status blocks both boards

(old portals: COI lives alone, unshared)

Cash

settlement lag before cash crunch

(old sheets: crunch marked ???, no timeline)

The challenge

Livestock moves under a stack of rules most software ignores. What if one product priced the risk and the haul in the same language?

Insured and carrier are often different companies. A lapsed hauler COI is a liability gap, not paperwork.

THE RESEARCH

Participant

Jordan

Owner-operator livestock hauler

Frustrations

Posted rates look fine until fuel, deadhead, and shrink eat the margin.
Lapsed COI blocks work with no shared path back in.
Density and 28-hr sit as badges, not underwriting inputs.
Settlements lag while insured and carrier stay flattened into one party.

How Might We

Make compliance status and haul economics decide the same moment?

By linking underwriting and load boards through shared hauler COI, range-based net, and failure states that block work instead of hiding risk.

CASE STUDIES

Three themes emerged from studying how livestock transit and cargo tools hide risk.

I looked at livestock MTC applications, hauler insurance pages, and generic load-board UX. Most tools treat compliance as a badge, parties as one field, and haul profit as a single number. Those gaps became Tetonic's design principles.

Compliance

28-Hour Law: Rest decides claim validity. Boards show it as a green chip with no countdown or denial link.
BQA density: 1.3 ft² / 100 lb sits in a PDF. Head-count boards never turn it into an overload flag.

Parties / COI

MTC forms: Insured and carrier are different lines on paper. Onboarding collapses both into one field.
Specialty cargo: Verified badges skip the expiry clock, the FMCSA 30-day window, and cross-board sharing.

Economics

Load boards: 75% of carriers wanted real shipper rates and margins, not one confident cell (Overdrive).
Settlement lag: Cash lives in a spreadsheet: due / in / bal, with crunch marked as ???.

IDEATION

User flow

Four flow charts. Certificate, COI, load range, and cash runway.

A bound haul moves from staging to delivery, or into a claim.

Certificate bound

New policy covers the haul

Staging

Docs hold the row until cleared, then departure unlocks.

In transit

28-hour clock is live

Delivered

Arrival ends the haul

Rest stop

5h+ rest, then continues

Overdue

No rest taken past 28h

Claim filed

Under review

Approved

then paid

Denied

Any state can end in a claim if loss occurs. Denial: negligence, lapsed COI, or pre-existing condition.

One insurance status. Both boards obey it.

Verified

Current coverage on file

Expiring

Renewal window opens before the date passes

Renewed

Work stays unlocked on both boards

Lapsed

Blocks staging and load quotes

Renewed from lapsed returns to verified. No separate COI truth per board.

History and COI gate a range before accept or walk away.

Load quoted

Posted rate lands on the card

Lane history check

Under 3 hauls needs a manual estimate

COI check

Lapsed blocks the quote

Compute net range

Fuel, deadhead, and shrink set the bounds

Healthy

Narrow, positive

Wide

Wide, positive

Straddle

Crosses zero

Walk away

Best case at or below zero

Accept or decline

Every outcome still ends in accept or decline. Soft edges stay visible.

Settlement timing shows crunch before the account goes short.

Open balance

30-day runway view

Feed health

Empty, stale, or fresh sync

Normal runway

Obligations sit against expected inflows

Crunch projected

Forecast dips below zero before settlement clears

Back to normal

Inflow arrives on time

Overdue inflow

Missed payment cascades

Normal

Late payment clears it

Still in crunch

Cascades to next obligation

Timing is the product. Balances alone hide the squeeze.

Design Decisions

Iterating on the elements that make risk visible instead of decorative. Polished live in Cursor across Potential Shipping, Current Shipping, and Bank Calculator.

Load board · rate cell

Trip rate

$2,140

$/mi

$2.18

single posted net · no cost range

One posted net number hides the real cost.

Cert28-hrFlag

CRT-1042OK—

decorative status chip

OK chips hide claim risk underneath.

Settlements

No bank feed connected

empty runway

Spreadsheet exports hide timing risk.

Load board · default theme

CRT-1042 · verified$2,140 · $2.18/mi

pale grays wash out in direct sun

Gray-on-white themes wash out in sunlight.

49 USC §80502

28-hr rest window

Column + hover diagram on Current Shipping

BQA density

1.3 ft² / 100 lb

Overload flag with horned +5% adj.

MTC parties

Insured ≠ carrier

Separate columns + shared hauler COI

Shrink economics

Weight loss = $

Feeds best-to-worst net range

User testing

Audited livestock MTC apps, hauler insurance pages, and generic load-board UX.

28 hrEvery board audited kept rest status behind a hover tooltip. Nothing persistent, nothing that blocks a click.

Next: treat rest windows as underwriting signals that can block work

+5%No board audited turned density into a row-level flag. Overload only shows up as a head count, never a risk state.

Next: encode overload as a board flag where the haul already is

30 dayCOI badges read identical the day before and the day of lapse. No countdown UI carries the cancellation clock.

Next: one shared hauler COI that blocks both shipping boards

75%No board audited let a hauler expand a rate cell to see the cost inputs behind it. The number is the whole UI.

Next: best-to-worst ranges plus cash timing before crunch

FINAL PRODUCT

Open fullscreen

WHAT I LEARNED

1
Model the failure graph first
Walk-away loads and lapsed COI taught more than the healthy card. Happy path alone is a brochure.
2
Tradeoff: honesty over a decisive number
A single est. net scans faster. Best-to-worst ranges cost glance speed and force a real accept/decline call. I chose the slower, honest read.
3
Tradeoff: block work over soft warnings
Keeping lapsed COI as a badge preserves throughput. Blocking quotes and staging is harsher UX. Liability only works if the product can refuse the haul.
4
Outdoor readability is a design constraint
High-contrast type and unclipped state copy came from running the board like someone standing in a yard, not a Figma artboard.

IMPACT

Goal Pillar

Design Intervention

Impact

Compliance as underwriting signal

28-hr statusBQA density flagsClaim review path

Signal

Compliance feeds claim validity instead of sitting as a decorative badge.

Shared party / COI model

Insured vs carrierHauler COICross-board block

One status

A lapsed cert stops both underwriting and quoting from the same spine.

Honest haul economics

Best-to-worst netWalk-awayThin history path

Ranges

Soft edges stay visible. No false precision on a posted rate.

Cash runway

30-day timelineObligations vs settlementsCrunch window

Timing

Settlement lag is first-class, not an after-the-fact surprise.

Next Steps

01
Put it in front of haulers. Real owner-operators still need to pressure-test filters, blocked copy, and cash timing.
02
Keep COI as one status. As the boards grow, do not fork certificate truth per view.
03
Live fuel, shrink, settlements. Bind ranges and cash runway to real inputs without losing outdoor readability.
04
Sharper walk-away copy. Make blocked and loses-money states impossible to miss on first scan.

Ethical considerations

Livestock transit tools sit between animal welfare law, insurance liability, and hauler cash survival. Hiding a lapsed COI or soft-edge net protects the interface and exposes the operator. Tetonic treats blocked work and walk-away loads as honest states, not errors to smooth over.

Tradeoff made

A vibe-coded HTML prototype bought a clickable judgment model in one day. Cost: no live feeds, no auth, no multi-user sync. The next pass should keep the failure graph and harden the copy with real hauler feedback.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Links

49 U.S.C. § 80502. Transportation of animals (Twenty-Eight Hour Law). Animals may not be confined more than 28 consecutive hours without unloading for feed, water, and at least 5 consecutive hours of rest. See also USDA NAL overview. uscode.house.gov.
BQA Mature Cattle Hauling Loading Density Guidelines. Uses FASS guidance of 1.3 ft² per 100 lb for mature/fed cattle; increase space 5% for horned cattle. Encoded as the overload signal in Current Shipping. PDF.
IDEAL Agriculture & Marine. "Livestock Motor Truck Cargo." Broad Form vs Specified Perils livestock transit coverage, plus death-only and related endorsements. Application PDF shows how insured/carrier and coverage type are underwritten in practice. Link. Application PDF.
Iowa Beef Center. "Shrinkage in Beef Cattle." Excretory vs tissue shrink; weight loss in transit is financial exposure when livestock sells by the pound. PDF.
Truck Guard. "Livestock Hauling Insurance." Specialty livestock cargo vs generic dry-van forms; mortality, injury, and shrink are distinct loss types. Motivates treating hauler COI as a shared control across insured and carrier parties. Link.
FMCSA financial responsibility. Insurers file BMC-91 / BMC-91X; cancellation notice starts a 30-day window before coverage ends and operating authority can drop. A verified badge cannot stand in for that clock. 49 CFR § 387.313. FMCSA L&I cancel help.
Overdrive. Owner-operator surveying on broker transparency: 75% of carriers wanted shipper rates and broker margins to negotiate and avoid being overcharged. Supports showing haul economics as a range, not one posted net. overdriveonline.com.
Nielsen Norman Group. "Visibility of System Status." Users cannot decide next actions when status is hidden or decorative. Supports treating 28-hr, density, and COI as decision inputs, not badge chrome. nngroup.com.
Nielsen Norman Group. "Indicators, Validations, and Notifications." Indicators are contextual and conditional; they should sit next to the content they qualify. Informs why compliance chips fail when they are detached from underwriting judgment. nngroup.com.
Nielsen Norman Group. "Dashboards: Making Charts and Graphs Easier to Understand." Length and position read faster than angle or single KPI tiles. Supports range bars and best-to-worst net over one decisive posted number. nngroup.com.
Nielsen Norman Group. "Error-Message Guidelines" and "10 Usability Heuristics Applied to Complex Applications." Severe states should block progress with a fix path nearby; soft warnings are for recoverable risk. Anchors Tetonic's choice to block lapsed-COI work instead of smoothing it. Error guidelines. Complex apps.
bolttech. "How Quoting Software for Insurance Boosts Productivity." Carriers without modern tooling see a baseline Net Promoter Score of 25-35 (some negative); modernized quoting targets 55-65. bolttech.io. MeasuringU. "The User Experience of Health Insurance Websites." 76% of customers use insurer portals weekly; 29% cite poor UX as a barrier to using them. measuringu.com. Motivates treating Tetonic's outdoor legibility and shared-status UI as productivity fixes, not cosmetic ones.