In a regulated industry, being compliant is top of mind.
Commercial fleets are required to comply with rules set by the Department of Transportation (DOT) on recording drivers working when driving, sleeping, resting, etc. Samsara provides the technology that aids customers in recording these numbers electronically -- Electronic Logging Devices (ELD).
Sometimes a truck could record driving times not linked to any drivers. Some common scenarios restuling in unassigned driving time are:
People moving trucks around in their lot as part of normal operation or maintenance (e.g., washing). This person doesn't have access to our app to state that they drove it.
A driver decided to use their right to take care of personal time and forgot to log it.
For some reason driving time wasn't recorded correctly (connectivity issue, wrong truck recorded, etc.)
The DOT requires that we give drivers the ability to claim or not claim these unassigned driving segments, ensuring that documentation is correct and up-to-date. I worked with our Compliance team to improve this feature.
Research and current offering
Before - Screenshots
From researching our user feedback list, looking at what we currently offer, and speaking with our Customer Support team, I identified the following pain points:
Users don't know where to go to claim these "unassigned driving times", as the button is a green text found on "Settings" (a very rarely used page). Since it's very important to be compliant, this results in fleet managers having to chase behind their drivers to remind them to claim these hours.
Users are forced to claim or not claim all of the driving times. This action is a lot of risk for a user to make when there is a larger number of driving times.
Users find it hard to make decision based on the information given. "Duration" is presented as a decimal number in hours - users have to think seriously to understand what is "16.8" hours, then add it to the start time at 6:33PM.
Ideation
What's the best workflow to notify and guide users to the claim screen? - I reimagined what the simplest claim workflow for a driver would be. This flow is the fewest steps, and guides the user through without searching around.
Help users claim individual segments - I need to think of patterns to help users review multiple "items", and assign each of the two statuses (mine or not mine) to these items. Some good solutions below:
This option allows for bulk assignment
This option have user go through each one by one.
Help users make decisions - It's not just claiming; users also need more information to remind themselves if they were indeed the person driving this truck at that time. The app can pull other information about the trip and location of the truck to help them make the decision.
Iterate
I showed the design to our team, asking for feedback and prioritization from both Engineering and Product Management. Going forward, I made a number of trade-off regarding:
Visual styling and making sure that our features fit the Samsara app and brand.
People want the extra information, but also like to see the list of all unassigned segments. I created an ideal in-between concept that takes the best of both options. This is the ideal state that we want to work towards.
Final version
Launch & Learn
We prioritized the improvements based on the following criteria:
Which problem/solution solves this compliance issue the right way? - We need to balance what's easiest for our users versus what would keep them compliant. From a business perspective, users/customers will spend the time and effort to ensure that they operate legally.
How do we ease the experience and make incremental changes? - We don't plan to overthrow this feature right away. It's important to start small and learn. I then drafted a number of designs that would bring us slowly to our desired state.
Results
I worked with the team to successfully launch our "Version 0", and then "Version 1" shortly after.
I also introduce these rows as a new component in our Design System.
