Car Maker Needs Fleet/Data Management
About NIO, My Role, Our Goal
NIO is a car maker based in Shanghai with remote offices in different parts of the globe. Our office in San Jose helps develop internal software used for day-to-day operations. One major goal in our operations is to achieve L4 autonomous driving capability. At NIO I help identify user needs, develop UX/UI flows, and visual design of applications which help achieve that goal.
Problem: Tracking Many Moving Parts
In order to achieve government levels of autonomous driving certifications, NIO vehicles equipped with road sensors must drive and collect road-specific data in real-time. The problem is keeping track of progress and status of all the moving parts - vehicles, sensors, drivers, planned routes, and the various data that are collected. NIO requires a fleet management application that could address this problem.
Moving parts.
Initial Process - Finding Solution Through Questioning
The concept of car/data management was new at the time and not many apps were available for comparison and research. I sat down with our project manager and business lead with questions which eventually led to discussions of use cases and the audience profiles for which the app serves. Flowchart were rendered and quick wireframes sketched and tossed on whiteboards to help visualize hypothetical concepts and experiences.
Flowchart and quick UI flows.
Brainstorming and Rationalizing
With the three main components narrowed down between route, data, and driver, we ultimately decided to focus on route because that would embody what data could be tied to it. For example, If pedestrian data is requested the route could be planned in cities and parks rather than highways. With this in mind, we explored several wireframes to best represent route as the main data block. After team approval, final visual design is applied and application is launched and tested over a period of time.
Wireframe agreement.
Route management dashboard.
Route planner.
Operator note insertion display.
Fleet manager's vehicle tracker.
Vehicle and notes info panels.
Corrections and Repairs
The returned findings were interesting and to an extent, not at all unexpected. We discovered that data scientists just want to request data and drivers just want to drive to gather data, and everyone requires a quick way to access their request statuses and updates. Based on these findings, the dashboard was rethought and overhauled. The resulting split-column layout offers a display of data requests against vehicle trips. With advanced search and sorting capabilities, each user personas could quickly track requests and statuses. The dual column also offers easy click-and-drag capability to link data request in one column to a vehicle trip in the next column without much data entry.
Refining user profiles.
Flow adjusted.
Wireframe revisit.
Updated dispatch dashboard.
Data request detail page.
Vehicle status and summary.
What I've Learned
It was incredibly rewarding to help develop and launch an application that is entirely new, unstandardized, and caters to very technologically advanced machines and devices that are all intertwined. It was fun to deep dive into user personas, to get inspired by different and varied use cases, and to discover interesting functionalities which we think may be useful and what users might want. But ultimately, nothing trumps real user needs and processes.