T.Express: Simplifying cross-border delivery for consumers

Context & Problem

In 2017, Ukrainian consumers faced significant barriers to purchasing from foreign online stores:

• Major marketplaces didn’t ship directly to Ukraine.

• Even when they did, shipping was slow and expensive (DHL/EMS).

• Customs clearance required in-person visits, complex paperwork, and often informal payments.

• Small goods—like a pair of shoes from eBay—were disproportionately difficult to import.

People were actively looking for alternatives but found existing delivery services confusing, manual, and unreliable. This was the opportunity: simplify the whole journey of buying from a foreign store and getting the item delivered to Ukraine — without additional stress, unexpected fees, or customs complications.

Research: Understanding the real barriers

I began with stakeholder sessions to clarify business constraints, logistics dependencies, and the limits of the B2C model. From there, I executed one of the most comprehensive research rounds in my early career.

Primary research activities

1. 30+ in-depth interviews with:

   1. Users who had already purchased internationally using third-party forwarding services;

   2. Users who ordered via EMS/DHL;

   3. Users who had never ordered internationally;

   4. A Customs broker;

   5. A Ukrainian Customs Service officer. 

2. Competitor usability testing with 20 participants.

3. Survey to map common scenarios, motivations, and friction points. 

4. Scenario mapping & journey analysis for typical delivery flows. 

Research questions

1. How do customers deliver purchases to Ukraine today?

2. Who are these people?

3. What scenarios drive international purchases?

4. Where do they struggle—and why?

5. What fears or misconceptions prevent them from ordering abroad?

6. What happens during customs clearance, and where do things break?

Key findings

1. 48% found competitor services “easy to use,” but only on the surface.

2. Task success rate for creating a delivery: 29–72%.

3. 60% of problems stemmed from users feeling “out of control” during shipping.

4. One-third of respondents were small businesses shipping product samples.

5. 69.2% struggled with the CN23 customs form—by far the biggest blocker.

These findings defined our north star: Make the end-to-end journey transparent and radically simplify customs clearance.

Design approach

Using research insights, I designed the end-to-end experience—from the T.Express brand identity and core product architecture to personas and journey maps grounded in real behaviors. I also reimagined the entire customs flow and built a Wizard-of-Oz MVP to validate demand without heavy engineering. Some of the early IA and user flow charts I created during the initial stages of the product design are shown below.

Solution #1

Clear information architecture: “My Orders” & “My Shipments”

Users struggled to understand where “ordering from a website” ended and where “delivery to Ukraine” began. I separated the experience into two predictable sections:

1. My Orders — for generating the warehouse address and tracking incoming parcels.

2. My Shipments — for preparing and sending deliveries to Ukraine.

This clarified the mental model and reduced cognitive load.

Solution #2

Making the process transparent with a wizard flow

Most users were unsure what the entire journey looked like. I introduced a wizard-like structure that:

1. Outlined each step up front;

2. Reduced uncertainty;

3. Made progress visible;

4. Decreased abandonment in the middle steps. 

Users always knew where they were and what came next.

Solution #3

Automating the CN23 customs form

This was the single biggest breakthrough. I redesigned the experience by:

1. Auto-filling fields using order details. 

2. Importing data from marketplace receipts. 

3. Minimizing manual input. 

4. Removing irrelevant steps. 

5. Providing short, contextual explanations in every field. 

This reduced frustration dramatically and created a competitive advantage.

Validation through a Wizard-of-Oz MVP

To move fast and test the concept with real users, we launched a Wizard-of-Oz MVP:

• The UI and flows worked as a real product.

• Backend operations (data entry, customs form preparation, and status updates) were handled manually by the T.Express team.

This allowed us to validate whether users understood the service, trusted it, and could complete tasks without engineering investment.

Outcomes & Impact

The MVP significantly outperformed competitors across all core UX metrics.

Key results

1. 84% ease-of-use rating (vs. 48% for competitors)

2. 92% task success rate for submitting a delivery (vs. 29–72%)

3. 64% found the customs form easy (vs. 30%)

4. 2 minutes average time to submit a delivery (vs. 14 minutes)

The results validated the hypothesis: Simplifying customs is the single most impactful improvement in this domain.

Project outcome

Right before launch, Ukrainian legislation changed around cross-border delivery value thresholds, making the B2C model unprofitable for TGL.

The project didn’t go to market, but it demonstrated how user-centered design can uncover viable business opportunities, deliver a tested, high-performing user experience for a complex operational system, provide clear guidance for logistics companies to expand into new segments, and help align the organization around real user needs. For me, it marked a shift toward deep research, iterative delivery, and Lean UX as my core approach to product design.

What I learned

1. Deep research drives high-impact decisions. Understanding users, customs officers, and logistics operations shaped every part of the product—not just the UI.

2. Complex systems can be made intuitive. If teams align early on constraints, customer journey, and mental models, even heavy operational flows can become predictable and straightforward.

3. Wizard-of-Oz MVPs are powerful. You don’t need a fully engineered backend to validate whether people understand, trust, and complete a workflow.