Vehicle Availability for Large Fleets
Case Study
Role
Product Design
Team
1x Product Manager
1x Design Manager
1x VP of Product Design
1x Director of Product
Duration
4 months
Intro
It was becoming increasingly complex for fleets with 10,000+ vehicles to manage the availability of their vehicles and assets through the existing maintenance product at Motive. I partnered with the product and sales team to identify multiple improvements through a series of new features and revamps, which would allow fleets and dispatch managers to manage availability and out of service statuses for vehicles.
Problem Discovery
During our discussions with the largest fleets in the US, we identified that they were using multiple tools to manage the maintenance of their vehicles, mainly because:
1. Fleet managers lacked real-time visibility of operational status of the vehicles.
2. The drivers had no way of knowing the availability of their assigned vehicle.
3. The dispatch managers would end up underutilizing a vehicle due to complexity of the process.
We found out the following things from our customers:
Engine Immobilizer is a must have for the all the fleets in Mexico.
Installing an Engine Immobilizer significantly reduces the insurance costs.
Fleet Managers need the ability to remotely immobilize the vehicles in case they get stolen or to prevent drunk driving incidents.
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:
Assigning the Engine Immobilizer to the vehicles
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.
Immobilizer Assignment Flow
The Engine Immobilizer can be assigned to any vehicle via the Admin panel.
Vehicle Immobilization Flow
The vehicles can be immobilized through the Fleet dashboard
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.
