Designing a fleet management software solution focused on usability and user experience (Part 1)

Introduction

Strix is a family of solutions that manages, administers and monitors ‘things’ or entities, such as vehicles or mobile devices (GPS, phones, key-ring localisers), in real time, generating alerts on preset events and allowing the analysis of the information obtained to improve different types of processes or subsequent actions.

Strix's solutions are based on the same internet of things (IoT) platform, internally known as Magenta. Each solution applies to a vertical market and is composed of one or more products. In turn, each product is made up of one or more features and each feature can also include or depend on other features (the latter are also known as capabilities or enablers). Our main objective was to understand the product, and familiarise ourselves with its current/potential users and its characteristics, since the product is marketed in several countries.

People involved in the UX and product design processes

‘Ideas within a company can come from anywhere, since creativity is inherent in everyone: designers, developers and stakeholders.

The team behind the process involved marketing, sales, product and IT personnel from Lo/Jack's team and designers, architects and engineers on the Leapsight's team. This 'cell' developed this new solution together using our agile processes and methodologies.

Product strategy

Behind every successful product, there is a clear strategic vision that takes into account the market and the customer’s needs. Essentially, strategy is the ‘set of choices a company makes to achieve its objectives’. These options include which products to develop, which market segments to focus on, how to differentiate yourself from the competition, how to calculate the price, how to position yourself and much more.

Our first task was to find out what strategy our client wanted to follow:

• What is their target?
• What needs do they have?
• What product or service do they have to offer and where?
• What are the characteristics of their product/service? Who is their competition?
• What is their differential value?

In short, we could put our client's strategy in this way:

FOR (our users), THAT HAVE (customer needs), (product/service name) IS (category in the market) WHICH PROVIDES (key benefit).

AS OPPOSED TO (competition), OUR PRODUCT/SERVICE OFFERS (differential value).

Using these references, our challenge was: How could we improve our client's pitch and product placement in the market?

Kick-off

The only information we had related to the product was the product itself. So that became our starting point: to get to know it and other, similar products from the competition. Our first step was, then, to try to define the issues and targets from our client’s point of view. That made it essential to understand the platform’s users, mainly those who interact with it for up to eight hours at a time in front of a screen: the monitoring operators.

Methodology

We planned our steps using what we call our design thinking model:

User Research and Ideation

We interviewed users with different profiles, to better understand their perspective on the topics presented. This helped us to resolve specific problems related to the UX and UI of the current platform. We discovered that many people were not using 100% of the tool’s functionalities ‘because I don’t know how to use it’, or because they considered some of the features irrelevant. All these points were taken into account and documented on a spreadsheet and shared with the client in Notion, a tool for writing, planning and organising digital projects, used by both the Leapsight and client teams. Using this research, we began the ideation process, where we reviewed and analysed the product’s problems (detected by us, our client or its users through the interviews).

Pains and Goals from the UX point of view

Problems discovered

Among the problems that we detected in the application, we highlighted that:

• entity locations on maps were confusing – they wanted the entity marker to change according to the zoom level;
• they needed point-of-interest layers as geolocation references for drivers;
• they needed real-time geolocation of the ‘things’, or at least more frequent position reports;
• reports were complicated (only 10% used this feature, the rest mostly didn't know how to use it);
• positions in maps were not precise (especially for street turnings);
• map displays had too much information, which made it very unclear;
• there was little use of features, due to ignorance or lack of understanding;
• the menu interface was confusing; and
• processes were not clear or there was not enough information on how to follow them.

Improvement opportunities

Some of the possibilities for improvements that we analysed were:

• visualisation of entities on maps in real time (entities are not only shown on maps, they are also ‘live’);
• simplification of the interface (we would only show elements on demand or when needed, e.g. points of interest should be shown in a different layer);
• simplification of map displays, drastically modifying the applied colour styles;
• optimisation of colour palettes to guide the user;
• identification of each ‘thing’ on the map through a new iconographic system, providing extra information, such as status (stopped, moving, on, towed or battery failure), orientation and, within a specified zoom level, indicators displaying the number of entities in a particular area.

User journeys/stories and ideation process

Notion’s spreadsheets helped us record, order and visualise all the issues that we had to take into account in order to categorise them according to ideas, proposals, priorities, effort, relevance, estimated development time and people involved, to use in stories, which were put into Craft – another of the project management tools used with the client. Although its main use is to expose functional issues to our client, we actively participated in the process of developing the what and how to make them visible. This process was constant and changing, since the definitions and their adjustments directly affected the visualisation structure that arose from the design and the user experience, e.g. what the user registration processes would look like, where to manage them from, conditions, labelled entities, entity information display modes and traces. These are some examples of functionalities that were adjusted based on new ideas, customer feedback, opinions or suggestions from the user tests carried out.

In Part 2, we will describe the Design Process

.

Facundo Loza

User Experience Lead at Leapsight