Discovery
When being brought onboard at a logistics and software company, one of the early initiatives I took on was to create personas of professional drivers. I interviewed six vehicle drivers and asked them about their interaction with software while on the job, the logistics of driving, and so on. I gleaned a lot of useful information from these talks. For example, drivers in our industry skewed older, and they talked about how it's vital to keep an even keel while on the road and performing other aspects of their jobs. While it is sometimes assumed that drivers in our industry are behind the curve technology-wise, they eagerly use apps and the like so long as they facilitate completing the tasks at hand. Examples included Waze and Gas Buddy. Later on, I was tasked with determining if fleet managers needed a mobile solution for viewing the status of their vehicles. If so, I wanted to determine what key functionality would be important for a minimum viable product. I spoke with internal and external users, and many of them mentioned that looking up the health of a specific vehicle was paramount, along with seeing a plan to fix that vehicle.
Design and Implementation
With that and other findings in mind, I mocked up several solutions using paper and pencil. After some consideration and a peer review with fellow user experience designers, I decided on the high-level flow and design components. I then used Axure to flesh out a couple of interactive mockups based on the best sketches. In meetings with the product owner, business analyst, and developers, we decided on a design that incorporated elements from the different interactive mockups, along with new ideas. When appropriate I invoked the persona and interview findings to justify my design choices. My desired interactions were balanced with the business and technical constraints. One of the things I liked about the final design is that it allowed for easy search for a specific vehicle using its Vehicle Identification Number or unit number, as well as a summary of problem vehicles.