Meet you in the middle. Two verified drivers split a long trip, meet at a midpoint, and hand off with a tracked chain of custody.
View Interactive Prototype →Long-distance delivery is broken in a specific, fixable way. A load that has to travel hundreds of miles, whether that is medical equipment, food, furniture, parts or freight, is typically handled by one driver covering the entire route, then driving back empty. It is expensive for the business paying for it and exhausting for the driver.
Banlu reimagines this as a split-route model: two verified drivers each cover half the distance and meet at a midpoint to hand off the load. It arrives faster and costs less, each driver ends up closer to home, and the business knows the price before booking.
I am the co-founder and designer of Banlu, operating under Progistice LLC. My role spans the full UX process: research, information architecture, wireframing, visual design, and prototyping. It is shaped by something most first-time founders do not have, which is 20 years inside the system I am designing for.
Before this project, I spent 20 years in healthcare as a case manager, coordinating care, navigating insurance systems, and advocating for vulnerable populations. I also co-founded and run Progistice, an active medical and commercial courier company in Massachusetts. The constraints, pain points, and workflows in this app aren't hypothetical to me. I've lived them operationally before I ever opened a design tool.
Design a platform that lets businesses post long-distance delivery jobs at a price they can see up front, and lets drivers complete them collaboratively by splitting routes at a midpoint to reduce cost, mileage, and driver fatigue, while maintaining a verifiable chain of custody.
The product needed to work for two very different users in the same transaction, at the same time, with trust as the foundation of the entire experience.
An operations lead at a hospital, a small business, or a larger company moving equipment, goods, or freight across county or state lines, reliably and on schedule, with proof the handoff happened.
Needs: a price up front, a job posted quickly, real-time status on both drivers, and a record if something goes wrong.
Takes on long-distance segments, often across New England into New York and Pennsylvania, used to driving long one-way routes and returning home empty, unpaid mileage that eats into earnings.
Needs: find jobs that fit their route, fair pay for their segment, fast low-friction handoffs, and ideally a job heading back toward home.
Because of my operational background, the earliest "research" for this project was years of firsthand experience running courier operations: delayed deliveries, underused routes, and the operational gaps that come from fragmented systems. This gave me a strong starting hypothesis: that splitting routes at a midpoint could meaningfully reduce cost and fatigue without sacrificing reliability.
To test that hypothesis with someone outside my own perspective, I gathered feedback from a long-haul courier driver who regularly runs New England routes into Buffalo, NY and Philadelphia, PA.
"As a driver I'm excited and believe Banlu will help and relieve stress from drivers from long trips… and with this method, gas is definitely saved." Driver feedback, route validation
"Other apps: pick up, 100 miles drop off, drive back 100 miles home, that's 200 miles. Banlu: pick up 100 miles, but we drive 50 miles, meet up halfway, then we drive 50 miles back, that's only 100 miles. You save gas, you save time, and if you're lucky another job might come out heading your way home. That's a winner." Driver feedback, mileage comparison
The split-route concept was immediately understood without explanation. Drivers translate "secure verified handoff" into "meeting somebody halfway" on their own. The driver also surfaced a value proposition not yet designed for: the return trip. This directly shaped a new feature, Return Route Match, where the midpoint becomes a routing hub, surfacing jobs heading back toward a driver's origin once they complete their segment.
After building an initial 4-screen prototype (Dashboard, Post Job, Transfer Hub, Driver Navigation), I conducted a structured gap analysis against UX deliverable requirements: information architecture, complete user flows, accessibility, responsive design, component library, and a usability testing plan. This surfaced that roughly two-thirds of the screens needed for a functioning product hadn't been designed yet: onboarding, authentication, identity verification, messaging, disputes, cancellations, empty and error states, and account management were all missing. This gap analysis became the roadmap for the next phase of design.
Early wireframes focused on the four screens representing the core "happy path", proving out the split-route mechanic before expanding to the full system.
Live routes in progress, status chips distinguishing "driver needed" from "transfer in progress," persistent Post-a-Job CTA.
The business enters pickup and destination, and the platform auto-calculates the midpoint, visualized on a route map.
Verified driver badges, live countdown for the transfer window, a checklist that gates "confirm transfer" until every custody step is complete.
Turn-by-turn navigation primary, segment pay and mileage visible at a glance, handoff verification code surfaced before arrival.
Each wireframe was annotated with interaction notes describing not just layout, but why each element existed. The Transfer Hub's confirm button stays disabled until the checklist is complete because that is the platform's accountability mechanism made literal.
The validated wireframes were developed into a live interactive prototype covering both the business and driver experiences end to end, across 14 core screens.
Splash, three-slide onboarding explaining the split-route concept in plain language, role selection (Sender vs. Driver), sign in, multi-step sign-up, password recovery.
Dashboard → Post a Job with live midpoint calculation → instant Quote and Rate Calculator → Job Detail → Live Tracking on a real-time map → Transfer Hub with an interactive chain-of-custody checklist.
Driver Dashboard → Available Jobs (filterable by segment/distance) → Job Detail with Accept/Decline → Active Route with turn-by-turn navigation and handoff code.
Identity verification (ID upload, selfie match, background check), payment/payout management, notification center, in-app messaging, support center with FAQ, cancellation and dispute flows, profile management, offline state, and a documented UI component library.
A deep slate base with a warm orange accent, chosen deliberately because in transportation and logistics orange signals a transitional state: not stopped, not go, but in between. That is exactly what the midpoint handoff represents. Sage is reserved for verification and trust signals, and linen carries the type so the interface stays readable in a truck cab.
Base. Trust, stability, low glare on the road
Accent. The transitional midpoint state
Verification and trust signals
The logo mark reflects the same thinking: two paths converging into a single orange diamond at the center, literally the meeting point, then continuing on as one line.
Every screen had to work for two users with opposite goals in the same transaction. A business wants reliability, visibility, and a predictable price. A driver wants efficient, well-paid segments.
In most delivery apps, trust is a rating system bolted on at the end. Here, verified identities, chain-of-custody, and transfer confirmation are the product, so the Transfer Hub had to visually communicate accountability at every step, including deliberately disabling the confirm action until verification was complete.
The original 4-screen prototype proved the concept, but the gap analysis revealed how much of a real product was not yet designed. Expanding the system while maintaining consistency was the largest single effort in the project.
Building this while completing the Google UX Design Certificate and running active courier operations through Progistice meant research had to be efficient and high-signal.
I was not just looking for usability issues. I was listening for whether the mechanic matched how drivers actually think about their routes. The driver's spontaneous mileage comparison was more persuasive than anything in my own pitch materials.
The Return Route Match concept came from a single driver finishing my sentence for me, which reinforced the value of real feedback early, even informally.
Structuring a formal gap analysis turned "what's missing" from a vague feeling into a prioritized, phased roadmap. That is a technique for the start of future projects, not just a checkpoint.
Choosing orange specifically for its "transitional" meaning, and building the logo around a literal halfway split, reinforced that visual decisions can do work for a product's positioning.