Michelin Fleet Management with Sascar

The Challenge

Sascar is a Michelin’s technology company focused on vehicle monitoring. It has many monitoring services and products, but until then there was nothing focused on fleet management and cost control. The challenge was to create a whole new solution, a new product focused on fleet management that could serve both small fleets (usually small businesses whose vehicles are used to support their operations) and giant fleets (carriers, logistic companies, in wich vehicles are part of the business).

My Participation

I worked on this project since it’s beggining, mapping the user journey at the current systems, identifying problems and improvement opportunities, defining the new system’s personas and user profiles, scope and functionalities, with the collaboration of the Product Owner, engineers and business analysts. My responsabilities were also to define the system’s information architecture, designing low, medium and high fidelity prototypes, writing instruction texts, creating UI standards and iconography, create and apply user tests and cardsdorting.

The Project

Through telefone interviews with the company’s customers, it was possible to identify the pains of the target public and think in new service opportunities to solve this growing demand at the market. After the benchmarking step - when I analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of Brazilian and foreigner competing systems, I made a navigable wireframe, a low fidelity prototype of the system, considering as premises the usability and scalability of the platform, the possibility of personalization (white label) and the creation of a unity between the company’s systems.

With the first prototype designed, I applied usability tests with users to measure the acceptability of the new functionalities and to evaluate whether the new features met the user needs and whether the structure of the system would be easy to learn and use. From this moment on, a design - test/validation - redesign cycle was started for each functionality of the new system, building a product fully focused on the user and customer needs. User testing was a recurring part of the system's creation process. With each new feature or component, I organized face-to-face and/or online tests to validate if the solution met expectations and fulfilled its purpose. In this way, it was possible to evaluate the whole system, focusing on design, on architecture, and on instructions texts.

In parallel with the features building, the UI components were made following the initial project’s requirements, prioritizing the function over aesthetics, making each graphic component have an objective to fulfill, a reason to exist at the system, making the experience no only easy, but also pleasant. With the creation of the main components, began the construction of a design styleguide, that later would be used to develop all the systems of the company. The result of this proccess was a successful case at the corporation: the project was born to serve a business segment and turned out to be the basis for a complete redesign of all other company’s products. Nowadays all services and products offered by Sascar are being unified on a single platform, wich I participated from it’s ideation to it’s delivery.

Results and lessons

I can say that the couple of years I worked focused exclusively on this project brought me a huge learning. The Product Owner has given me freedom to apply and test several usability techniques and working proccesses until we could find the best tools and fluxes for the team and the company’s dinamic. The opportunity of dialog with all business areas involved at the concept proccess (from engineers to marketing analysts) made possible to the design team to create a bridge between professionals, comprehending the needs of each area and searching for solutions that fit the corporation’s strategy, creating then a balanced product development proccess.