🔐 This project is protected for confidentiality. Thanks for understanding!
Increasing operational efficiency and potential $20,000+ in yearly fleet savings
COMPANY
Samsara
MY ROLE
Product Designer
PROJECT TYPE
Internship/ Personal Project
TIMEFRAME
10 weeks—2024
OVERVIEW
challenge
Fleet managers lacked proactive tools to prevent costly Hours of Service violations, forcing them into reactive coaching.
Team & Role
Skills practiced
Product Design
B2B Design
Tables/ Data Viz
AI tool ideation
Projected to reduce HOS violations by
20%
Addressed
4 key customer needs
Projected savings for fleets
$20,000 / yr
Context
Samsara provides a truck driver coaching product that driver managers use to monitor and address trucker behavior.
This product currently helps managers coach drivers primarily on safety-related events detected by Samsara's systems.
Managers utilize a coaching feed interface as part of their regular workflow. Overall, it has received positive feedback from customers so far.
The problem
However, this existing system primarily focuses on safety-related events, leaving other critical behaviors behind.
Specifically, reliable coaching and tracking for behaviors like Hours of Service (HoS) violations or significant idling were missing.
This meant managers lacked a comprehensive view of all coachable moments impacting driver performance and compliance
why it matters
For many fleet managers, an Hours or Service violation can be even more costly (legally and financially) than a safety related incident.
Insights from customers indicated that addressing HoS violations promptly is crucial due to significant economic and legal costs, sometimes making it a higher priority than safety coaching.
Because HoS tracking was separate, managers were forced into a reactive mode, unable to easily identify patterns or proactively coach drivers to prevent them from going into violation, leaving significant compliance risks unaddressed.
The solution
So with that in mind, I designed a concept for a unified coaching feed that ensures that these violations are easy to spot, coach, and track.
The goal was to help managers prioritize coaching effectively by presenting HoS events within the same feed they already used, enhanced with features like top-level metrics and clear visual cues for risk assessment.
Design Goals
Reduce cognitive load by making it easy for driver managers to decide who to coach first.
Tell a brief story of the driver so that managers don’t have to click into another page.
Clearly call out HOS violations or near violations.
Keep overall layout consistent with what driver managers are used to because they are typically slower to adopt new technology and processes.
Early explorations
I started by exploring what the overall layout would look like.
I decided to go with a table + metric cards as it didn't take up too much space, yet gave the user an overall view as to what was happening that week in coaching.
Final solutions
Design Rationale
I wanted to be sure that each of my design decisions clearly connected back to an insight I had gathered during the research.
the impact
Although this was a conceptual project, I believe it could have the following impact:
For the customer
Cost Reduction: Directly reduce costly Hours of Service violations by enabling preventativie intervention.
Workflow Efficiency: Improve manager workflows by focusing their limited time on the highest-risk drivers.
Program Effectiveness: Providing better tools and context for HoS coaching, alongside safety, creates a more holistic view of driver behavior and performance
For the business
Revenue Growth: Expanded product value drives premium pricing and retention
Competitive Advantage: First-to-market with integrated compliance coaching
Product Expansion: Foundation for more types of proactive coaching, including AI voice alerts.
Reflection
What I'd do next if this was a real project…
Test with at least 4-5 users to see how my interpretation of their needs aligns with how they actually work and coach drivers.
Clean up and organize design files for smooth dev handoff, annotating key interactions and new design system components.
Work on a future vision where fleet managers are presented with a dashboard with clear action items instead of a table they have to manage or keep up with.
What I'll bring with me to future projects…
Awareness of the industry context: In more conservative industries, it's important to remember who our users are. Smaller changes and familiar patterns will drive adoption more-so than drastic re-hauls.
Sweat the details: I went into it thinking that designing just one page of the experience would be a breeze, but the amount of tiny design details I had to pay attention to opened my eyes and made me a more thoughtful designer. Designing a page that is dense is hard! And I'm excited to keep practicing and learning strategies for making information pop, fade in to the background, or scream for your attention.
