How to re-imagine the 21-century trucking experience, going beyond the diesel engine, and using design thinking in a human-centric approach to find real problems and develop meaningful solutions.
Role
Senior UX Designer
UX and Visual Design
Team Details
2 Sr. and 1 Jr. Designer
1 Dedicated Researcher
Duration
1 Year
1 Release
The ask was to two-fold, first was to design and develop a custom mobile application that would allow over the road truck drivers to self-diagnose and report issues with their vehicle, track the vehicles service history, and communicate and schedule repairs with a shop facility. In addition, a supporting Salesforce backed desktop application was-to be created, that would allow an onsite shop supervisor to receive the reports of the trucks condition, facilitate repairs and route said truck to the appropriate place, and communicate and coordinate with the supporting facility’s such as tire shops and tow services.
We were tasked with “Re-imagine the 21-century trucking experience, going beyond the diesel engine, and using design thinking methods in a human-centric approach to find real human problems and develop meaningful solutions.”
This statement resulted in trying to solve some ingrained problems. Stemming from the driver distrust of technology to the lack of accurate information being relayed to the shops. Here are a few of the problems we were faced with:
Discover
None of us on the UX team had exposure to working in this industry or dealing with fleet management applications so familiarizing ourselves with the subject matter, the users, and their workflows was paramount. We spent a great deal of time meeting with product owners, end users, and analytics from competing products. We conducted user interviews to gain a deeper understanding of their as-is way of working, so we could better drive out what their end goals were. A few of the sample questions are below:
Define
Using the data collected during the discovery stage we made maps of the Users journey across all the touch points to understand where we could improve their experience and what was truly causing them pain and frustration. We also created user personas representing the ideal user of these applications.
Design and Delivery
From there we were able to draft a series of Low-Fidelity wires frame which were compiled into a prototype that was tested by end users at a predetermined series of test locations. Feedback from each of these sessions was rolled into the prototypes to rapidly iterate and revise as we went.
Once happy with the results the designs were then run through a validation step with development to ensure technical feasibility within the SalesForce and mobile environment. Any technical challenges were addressed, and adjustments made to the Low Fidelity designs.
With all parties in agreement, we created high-fidelity versions of the designs using the established pattern library. These designs were redlined and handed off in a package format with all necessary supporting elements.
On release iService became a successful MVP field-testing Beta/POC with a small number of collaborating shops and trucking fleets. We were able to streamline the flow of information from the driver to the shop and the shop to the repair facility. This resulted in a reduction of overall down time for a given truck increasing profitability for both the driver and the shop.
In addition, I was able to develop an understanding of working within the SalesForce environment and its constraints while also garnering an understanding of creating a predictive and planned maintenance application, which I would later leverage for the PowerNS Project.
Devices Registered
(Android Device)
Breakdowns
Reported
System Categories
Involved
Devices waiting to register
(iOS Device)
Breakdowns handled
through the app
Number of Initial
Breakdown Calls
Early Number Metric based on initial rollout of MVP iService 0.1 Release in 2 Test Facilities
