VQ Driver for iPhone & Android

Designing Safety Features to Reduce Accidents & Save Lives

Background

One of the primary functions of Derive Systems' VQ device was to allow fleet owners to monitor who was using each vehicle and when. This functionality was enabled by the VQ Driver app—essentially a key FOB app that connected to a VQ automatically at the beginning of each trip and communicated which driver was logged in.

When I joined Derive there were a host of highly complex and ambitious safety features on the VQ Driver app's product roadmap that I took responsibility for researching, designing, prototyping, and testing. These features presented a range of challenges when considering phone support, vehicle type, driving conditions, audio accessibility, etc.

By collaborating with a cross-functional team and guiding multiple research and testing campaigns, I was able to validate which new features to pursue and which to avoid. This process involved some advanced prototyping, video production, and even some audio design.

Company

Derive Systems

Customer

Comcast

Team

2 mobile developers, 2 database engineers, 2 firmware engineers, 1 product manager, 1 designer (me)

Contributions

Rapid prototyping, research, cross-functional collaboration & planning, design documentation, animation, videography, UX writing

Project Duration

May 2018–June 2021

Challenges

By The Numbers

The following statistics are from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and represent issues that my team attempted to address when adding features to the VQ Driver app. Because our app was used by many thousands of fleet drivers each day, our potential to have a positive impact on each of these statistics was significant.

Distracted Driving

3,142

That's the number of fatalities from distracted driving in 2020. Texting and phone usage was a major contributor to that total.

Speeding

9,478

Here's the number of speed-related fatalities from 2019. The total number of injury accidents and amount of property damage related to speeding is hard to imagine.

Seatbelt Usage

47%

That's the percentage of those killed in 2019 who were not buckled up. While thankfully seatbelt usage in the U.S. remains high, unrestrained drivers experience some of the worst injuries from collisions.

Process Overview

The Sales Road Show app as seen at CES 2018.

Derive's proof of concept Sales Road Show app as seen at CES 2018.

Adapting the Road Show

Another app that I took ownership of at Derive was referred to internally as the Sales Road Show. This app was a basic proof of concept for how Derive's technology could connect to and control various aspects of a vehicle.

At the same time I began incorporating new features into Driver, I continued feature development and optimization of the Road Show. This helped inform some of the decisions made for the Driver app by allowing myself and a mobile dev to run tests and experiments that weren't practical elsewhere.

I also quickly became the Road Show demo expert, providing live road demonstrations to potential new hires, office guests, and customers. This turned out to be a great way of frequently gauging new people's reactions to design decisions.

Photo taken during onsite visits to test Distracted Driver Prevention

Photo from one of my many site visits and ride alongs with users of the app.

Hitting the Road, Building Personas

I personally conducted many hours of onsite interviews and research for the Driver app. This allowed me to observe not only how the app was used but in what environments. I discovered and documented important details that were common among drivers such as phone mounting locations, connected bluetooth devices, and other hardware specific to the fleet's mission. This also gave me an opportunity to talk directly with drivers about their routines and experiences using the Driver app.

Speaking directly with drivers was an essential part of building meaningful and relevant personas. Because fleet drivers spent so much time in their vehicles, it was important to take into consideration their relationship with and perceptions of that space. For many drivers, their vehicles became a very personal place—an important point that I frequently stressed to the team when considering new functionality.

Examples of prototyped phone screens arranged next to physical controls from within a vehicle.

Showing how I incorporated elements of vehicle status such as seatbelt and transmission state into design prototypes.

Prototypes + Context

Because our app existed in the context of a vehicle and much of the app's feedback was informed by the vehicle's status, e.g., is it out of park?, is the seatbelt buckled?, etc., it was essential to include these elements in my mockups and prototypes and make them interactive. For example, at any point during the prototype it was possible to click on the seatbelt and see how the app would react to a state change of the buckle.

Examples of storyboards alongside frames from the subsequent videos that I produced for the Driver app.

Examples of my rough storyboards arranged next to frames from the finished video. Videos like this were extremely effective at communicating timing and other context.

Lights, Camera, Shared Understanding

I discovered early in my work at Derive that, even after long hours of design sprints with a cross-functional group and the distribution of mockups and prototypes based on that effort, there could still be considerable confusion about how the final implementation would behave in a real setting. This was because of the complex nature of device connections, timing, and vehicle behaviors involved in the Driver app's usage, and I found it invaluable to generate video content that clearly illustrated all of these factors.

I collaborated with the product manager to create storyboards, record the video sequences, and edit them together with appropriately placed references to my prototype screens. These videos were shared with the various stakeholders for approval and eventually embedded into the product documentation to serve as a reference for developers.

Example of a Tableau report displaying analytics for Driver app activity.

Screenshot of one of the Tableau reports related to a VQ Driver beta. Each chart represents a different driver or vehicle activity. Usually I'd point and say, "Oh, what's that!?", and the data engineer would say, "That's nothing but this...this is interesting." and we'd go from there.

Watching the Data 👀

Once a new feature had been thoroughly tested internally, we'd roll it out to a small subset of drivers for real-world testing. Unfortunately, there was rarely a practical or ideal way of closely monitoring these tests in real time—this was typically due to legitimate concerns of liability and being disruptive to drivers. For that reason, I'd regularly sit with one of the database engineers to comb through analytics and other feedback returned by the cloud, gathering points of inquiry for driver surveys and future testing.

Features

Distracted Driver Prevention (DDP)

Preventing phone-based distractions with vehicle-to-phone communication

The Distracted Driver Prevention feature on iPhone.

Screens I designed showing the progression from the DDP primer notification, to the app's base screen with transmission feedback, followed by the DDP lock screen containing the emergency unlock button.

UI simplicity was key in the VQ Driver app—both as a means of avoiding distraction and out of respect for drivers' time and attention. When drivers first connected or returned to a DDP-enabled vehicle, they'd receive a brief primer about the feature. Before beginning their first DDP trip, drivers would need to either acknowledge the new feature, or tap a link to view an explainer about what to expect. In addition to the design, I provided much of the microcopy for these interactions.

Emergency Unlock

One of the elements of DDP that I advocated for and was eventually included in the app was emergency unlock. In the unlikely case that a vehicle was involved in an accident or a major malfunction occurred, drivers might need to circumvent the DDP feature and unlock their phone while the vehicle was out of park. To prevent the unlock feature from being abused, I paired it with a confirmation prompt letting drivers know that use of the feature was tied to a supervisor notification. This was further tied to a 5-second timer allowing drivers to cancel an unintended emergency unlock.

Seatbelt Dependent Start (SDS)

Disabling vehicle movement until a driver was safely buckled

Images of the Seatbelt Dependent Start feature on iPhone.

Going a step further from the seatbelt chime that exists in most vehicles, the SDS feature partially disabled a vehicle by locking the shifter until its driver was buckled. If a driver unbuckled during a trip and continued driving, this would trigger a post-trip notification indicating that the behavior had been detected and logged.

One part of this feature that I discovered from speaking with one of the firmware engineers was the ability to detect attempted shifting while the transmission shifter was locked. This allowed us to send a push notification to the driver in the event they were unaware or had forgotten why the shifter was not working. This was an example of a complex interaction that benefited greatly from my ability to storyboard and generate video demonstrations.

Speeding Prevention

Detecting posted speed via GPS and regulating it through the app

A rendering of the Sales Road Show app mounted on a dashboard.

A rendering of the GPS-enabled speed control feature as seen in the Sales Road Show app. My work on this relied on some clever UI elements from fellow designer, Chris Alvarez, including a vector-based vehicle design.

Assisted driving features are becoming increasingly common in many newer-model vehicles. The speeding prevention features for the Driver app enabled automatic speed regulation in older-model vehicles. Using a combination of the VQ and phone's GPS locations, the posted speed became a baseline for the vehicle's top speed. While this was arguably the most sought after feature by Derive's customers, it was also the most challenging to implement.

Because of the significant development hurdles, most of my work on this feature remained in the Sales Road Show app, one of the splashier parts of that demo.

Conclusion

The Driver app was easily the most challenging project that I undertook at Derive Systems. The technical hurdles and requisite design compromises alone made it difficult. Compounding those challenges was navigating the complex relationship between a highly-sought-after driver workforce and their employer, eager to find a balance between implementing safety features and keeping drivers happy. This political balance on the customer side made it especially difficult to advocate for adequate testing of feature updates, and I learned a great deal about being successful in that through my collaboration with product management, sales, and executive leadership.

Business Impact

Improved customer satisfaction according to Sales and executive leadership
Eliminated phone distraction on hundreds of DDP-enabled vehicles as measured by firmware analytics tools
Simplified early stages of the sales pipeline by producing clear and concise video demonstrations and prototypes