Trace

TIMELINE

Aug – Nov 2025

ROLE

Product Designer

TEAM

2 Engineers
1 PM
1 Designer (me!)

TOOLS

Figma

Overview

An operations workspace that helps timber-trading teams collect shipment data, catch inconsistencies and generate standardized trade documents from one place.

The Context

Timber shipments require specialized teams across countries to coordinate contracts, cargo data and shipping documents. Today, this information is scattered across spreadsheets, PDFs, email, Dropbox and WhatsApp.

A single delayed documentation cycle resulted in a $15,000 demurrage fee for one trader we interviewed.

5ā€“8 standardized documents per shipment

20% of a shipment cycle can be lost to correction loops

6ā€“12 months to train a documentation specialist

INSIGHTS

Accuracy was only one part of the problem
From 30 user interviews, three needs emerged:

Documents must agree with each other.

Generic document tools can summarize files, but trade documentation requires structured tables, shipment-specific calculations and precise formatting.

Solution

TRACE brings the shipment workflow into one dashboard where teams can:

  • Create and track a shipment
  • Invite different teams to enter their information concurrently
  • Upload contracts and supporting documents
  • Detect missing fields, expired information and inconsistent values
  • Track the completion of each required document
  • Automatically draft standardized shipping documents
  • Review, approve and share the final document bundle.

Key Features

One shared shipment workspace

Automatic error detection

Instant document generation

Editable spreadsheets

Outcome

Validated with real trade documents

  • 70 documents supplied by a timber-trading design partner
  • 65 documents successfully checked and corrected
  • 92.9% successful error detection and correction
  • 30 industry interviews
  • 1 design partner willing to pay
  • 2 companies on the waiting list

Want to learn more?

There is a full deck we presented to other teams, judges and the design partners! Iā€™m happy to chat more about my process over a call. Reach out to me at ssud@usc.edu !