Helping Truckers Navigate Across the Country
Samsara creates safe and sustainable shipping operations by tracking truck fleet performance. I collaborated with researchers and designers to improve fuel efficiency and driver safety metrics by focusing on the well-being of truckers through a new mapping app.
Timeline - 3 Months
Role - Research, Design, Prototyping, Testing
Team - 4 Designers, 1 PM
The Problem at a Glance
Truckers rely on truck stops for food, gas, parking, and showers but face unique challenges along the way:
1. Tracking four complex work break clocks
2. Avoiding unsafe routes from Apple/Google Maps
3. Finding truck stops puts safety and well-being at risk
Final Solution Highlights
Semi trucks are designed for the long haul. So, their navigation apps should be too. Samsara navigation helps truckers navigate interstate shipments amidst mandatory work breaks, unsafe roads and tight deadlines.
Never Miss a Work Break Again
Truckers constantly track four federally mandated break clocks of varying complexity. Avoiding work break violations—which put employment at risk—is like performing mental gymnastics. The default navigation screen always displays time until the nearest break and alerts truckers at 30 minutes left via visual and auditory cues.
Find Amenities on the Road
Truckers often violate work break regulations because they struggle to find truck stops. When Samsara’s hardware detects an upcoming work break, truckers can easily navigate to a suggested truck stop. Essential amenities at suggested truck stops are viewable at a glance.
Route to the Perfect Truck Stop
Truckers vary in tech literacy. It’s why they dangerously exit navigation to Google “nearby truck stops” while driving (a behavior observed through research). Truckers can route to nearby truck stops in-app without typing a single word.
PROCESS
How we got there
INITIAL BRIEF
As an Asian American college student, I knew nothing about trucking. Through secondary research, I familiarized myself with the industry, lifestyle and lingo. Articles, forum discussions, statistics, and community-generated memes agree: truckers live a precarious life.
Samsara’s routes team had a hypothesis: improving the quality of life for individual truckers would drive fleet performance metrics. I distilled the initial brief into three research goals to explore this assumption and answer the question: “what parts of a trucker’s life can we improve to drive fleet performance metrics?”
Concision for Safety
Parking, food, gas and showers are the most important amenities to truckers. Displaying relevant information and reducing obstruction was accomplished through research and testing with truckers.
Dragging vs. Tapping
Dragging interactions are not accessible to truckers who vary in tech literacy. The goal was to allow easy dismissal of suggestions through large touch targets, and a consistent call to action strategy.
Refining the Suggestion Card
Multiple iterations were tested with truckers to show relevant amenities without obstruction, reinforce a consistent call to action strategy and use accessible interaction patterns for safety.
Removing Intrusion
Driver interfaces should be minimal. So, associated interactions should be too. I aimed to reduce intrusion and commitment to the selected truck stop before finalizing a reroute.
Trucker-friendly Components
I designed a trucker-friendly component library with key considerations to the target user and associated contexts. For example, phones are mounted further away in semi trucks than in cars so touch targets and font size were increased. Keeping a tight call to action strategy was also essential for improving usability for less tech savvy users.
Impact
In spring of 2020 my team and I presented and handed off designs to researchers, and designers of the routes team at Samsara. Our designs are currently under review.
THIS PAGE’S CONTENT WAS NOT PRODUCED BY SAMSARA AND DOES NOT REFLECT THE COMPANY’S VIEWS.