Preventing vehicle theft with Engine Immobilizer

Case Study

Role

Product Design

Team

1x Product Manager

1x Design Manager

1x VP of Product Design

Duration

2 months

Intro

Expanding to Mexico region for Motive came with a unique set of requirements. All the fleets in this region require an Engine Immobilizer to be installed in their vehicles to prevent vehicle theft and reduce insurance costs.

Problem Discovery

I talked to a few of our customers to understand their requirements. Since our customers spoke Spanish, we took help of one of our Mexican teammates to help us bridge the conversation.

We found out the following things from our customers:

  1. Engine Immobilizer is a must have for the all the fleets in Mexico.

  2. Installing an Engine Immobilizer significantly reduces the insurance costs.

  3. Fleet Managers need the ability to remotely immobilize the vehicles in case they get stolen or to prevent drunk driving incidents.

  4. Our competitors already provide such solutions, however they are unreliable with connectivity issues.

Forming the Solution

We settled on using an LTE based Engine Immobilizer which would be connected to the vehicle through the starter line. This immobilizer would be remotely controlled via the Fleet Manager dashboard, further support would be provided post MVP.

User Flows

To understand and create the end to end journey and cover all edge cases for all types of users, I started by creating the user flows for the core experiences:

  1. Assigning the Engine Immobilizer to the vehicles

  2. Ability to Immobilize and Mobilize the vehicles using Fleet Dashboard

Wireframes

I started designing wireframes to explore different ways of implementing the solutions, including the placement of several components inside existing pages. One such example can be seen below.

High Fidelity Designs

After several rounds of feedback and collaborations with other designers from different product areas, I finalized the designs.

  1. Immobilizer Assignment Flow

The Engine Immobilizer can be assigned to any vehicle via the Admin panel.

  1. Vehicle Immobilization Flow

The vehicles can be immobilized through the Fleet dashboard

  1. Fleet View Changes

Fleet Managers can track the vehicle status through the map and list view. Tooltips show additional context, which helps the Fleet Managers with crucial information on hardware status and time.

Validation with customers

We reviewed our designs with one of our customers before shipping them. I translated all the designs and copies to Spanish using Google Translate and DeepL Translate. The overall feedback was positive with some technical requests for the future.

What they liked:
1. The ability to remotely immobilize vehicles and the ability to view vehicles and their statuses spread out on the map.
2. The ability to view Immobilizer status on the vehicle

What they wished we also added:
1. Acceleration control for the vehicles (Planned for future release)
2. Ability to maintain a whitelist of drivers for specific vehicles (Also planned for future release)

More work

Future work is being done at this moment to aid Fleet Managers with historical analysis of their vehicles. This information is going to be crucial in identifying patterns and mediating with insurance companies.