Overview

Our team guided auto manufacturer client’s Test Vehicle Management Group(will shorted them as mgmt.G from here on) understanding their decades-old communication problems with test vehicle owners better, and built the product to solve the issues together with the client team.

 

Team & Role

Balanced teams at Tanzu Labs consists of a product designer(in this project, myself), a product manager, and 2 software engineers. Each of our members are paired with clients of the same role, and work together whole day throughout the project to build the product “together”, while also guiding them to become stronger agile development team.

While collaborating in multidisciplinary team, my main responsibilities as a designer were to:

  • Plan design researches and conduct user/stakeholder/expert interviews

  • Lead synthesis sessions to draw insights from gathered information

  • Lead idea generation, while visualizing team’s ideas ASAP to help discussions become concrete early on

  • Evolve concepts through fast prototyping & testing iterations

  • Create and maintain design system

  • Communicate design intentions and requirements to developers, and review the final screens

  • Guiding the growth of the client team’s designer with very limited design education & experience(few weeks to months), so that they can do all of the above after the engagement is over

 

Background & Challenges

There are about 10,000 test vehicles in the company, and most of them are owned by members in planning or research departments.

Our stakeholder, “Test Vehicle Management Group”(mgmt.G) administers these test vehicles to ensure that vehicle assets are properly managed & utilized.

Vehicle owners usually want to keep as many vehicles as they could, just in case they need those cars in the future(even seldomly). However, the Management Group’s mission is to keep the cost of operation as low as possible.

This is causing the constant struggle between vehicle owners and the mgmt.G, one side wants to keep more vehicles and the other continually asking to review the necessity of keeping vehicles and dispose them as soon as possible.

There is huge imbalance of power between two sides. Vehicle owners always have final say over whether a vehicle is needed for future uses, but mgmt.G has been doubting if most of those vehicles are being utilized enough to be extended.

Our stakeholder, Test Vehicle Management Group, wanted to improve the ratio of vehicle ownership returns, and also wanted to see convincing evidence that the vehicle is necessary when its lifecycle is extended.

 

Learnings & Strategic Directions

Developing great vehicles was the company’s top priority. When researchers say they need the vehicle, they can keep them regardless whether the vehicle is actually necessary or not. There is NO WAY to force the return of vehicle ownership.
→ Rather than keeping conventional way of communication based on doubts and accusations, provide more support to vehicle owners so that they can make more appropriate decisions and take actions easier than now, by doing the followings:

  1. Vehicle owners feel lost with numerous notification emails coming from multiple mgmt.G members regarding vehicle management. Those mails are sometimes regarded as nuisance, and simply end up unread and lost.
    → Create unified communication channel with vehicle owners, and make it easy to check what has to be done about their vehicles now.

  2. Necessary data for making vehicle management decision is spread across multiple inefficient platforms in the company, and vehicle owners are having hard time gathering them when needed.
    → When asking vehicle owners to take actions, provide necessary information

  3. Vehicle management is considered chore for vehicle owners. They are usually already busy with research activities and if they’re in rush when deciding extension of vehicle ownership, they will default to “extending” rather than “returning” because it is simply easier action to take with less administrative processes.
    → Make the “returning vehicle” process easier to understand and go through.

 
 

モビカル MVP: the First step of a big Change

Our ultimate plan for the product is quite complex(described further in growth plans section). However, the MVP only focuses on streamlining the process of sending out a specific type of message from mgmt. group to vehicle owners. We started by creating a pleasurable experience for users in very small area as fast as possible, but what I designed is a easily reusable/expandable template that can be used to systemize many different tasks.

 
 

messaging task before mobility carte

The conventional mailing process of Mgmt.G involved a lot of manual downloads of data from multiple systems & processing them with excel macros for narrowing down the list, and manually copying and pasting contents into personal mailing app to actually send out those messages.

 

how it works

Test Vehicle list

This is the main screen where the user selects a preset for his task, and the system automatically filters out data to display only the most relevant vehicles. So that the user doesn’t need to download and run macros on multiple excel files.

Before sending out the messages, there are few things the user still has to confirm themselves(these couldn’t be automated for now, due to company regulations). The list displays only relevant data columns for the task(raw data contains hundreds of columns from the main system)

※ To systemize other tasks, client team just need to add another preset with different data columns and filtering logics. The design system is also designed in a way that it is easy to update the number & size of table columns and also types of each cells.

 

vehicle details

When the users click on one of the rows on the vehicle list table, they will come to this page which shows detailed info of each vehicle that might be relevant when considering their necessity.

Users usually don’t need to come to this page because most of important data are on the list view. However, there are some edge cases where users need to check more detailed info on this screen.

Elements on this screen is designed in a way that it will be easy for clients to modify number of sections & data rows in the future.

 

compose Message

When the user clicks “メッセージ作成“ button on the list view after selecting vehicle owners to contact, the compose message screen will be loaded with all the recipient info and contents already prepared, including the attachment file that lists target vehicles with relevant info.

For their regular tasks, users don’t need to anything other than pressing the “send” button to finish their task on this screen.

 

growth plans

In the future, the product is planning to:

  • Cover more area of RT’s services: MVP version only covers a single task, but it will expand to more and more communication tasks within the vehicle management services.

  • Become a unified source of vehicle management information for vehicle owners: Currently, vehicle owners are getting numerous emails from multiple mgmt.G members, regarding various vehicle management tasks(often regarded as spams). and they are having hard time following what needs to be done for their vehicles. mobility carte will provide a way to easily check summed up info of vehicle management related tasks in the future.

  • Help users to make data driven decisions: mgmt.G started to install tracking devices inside of test vehicles, and planning to gauge the necessity of extending(or ending) vehicles’ lifecycle based on operation frequency & length. They chose mobility carte as the platform to analyze the data and take actions accordingly, and the client team is working on related features now.

  • Make application process regarding vehicle management process seamless: The friction of using inefficient systems for vehicle management is often stopping vehicle owners from taking timely & appropriate actions.