- ROLE
UX Researcher and Designer
Prototyping
- TYPE
Product Design
UX/UI Design
- LENGTH
10 weeks
Glocal-Eyez Road Maintenance is a map navigating app that incorporates with road maintenance and condition monitoring function. In addition to basic searching and navigating features, this app factors in additional attributes including fuel consumption, monitoring road conditions, topography, predicting idling time and even individual users’ vehicles and driving styles.
Overview
The Message
“Quality of roads affect (1) Safety, (2) Traffic, (3) Comfort of driving, (4) Fuel consumption and (5) Quality of air.
The Problem
Drivers compensate for poor roads by pressing a little harder on the accelerator to maintain a constant speed, they burn more fuel and spew out more carbon dioxide. Road quality could account for 10 to 15 percent of fuel use in urban settings. Therefore, good road quality has been an important factor in reducing carbon pollution for our environment. On the other hand, drivers tend to drive on better maintained road to protect the car and save fuel cost.
However, current road monitoring approaches and tracking tools are expensive, weather-dependent and lack frequency and network-scale measurements needed to prioritize repairs, and most tools are operated by the government, which results in a lack of up-to-date tracking and monitoring for development purpose.
The Solution
Building an app that incorporated into navigation maps. When drivers navigate in route the app automatically monitors the road condition of the route. Some navigation apps already offer an “eco” option based on distance and average fuel consumption. This app could factor in additional attributes including road conditions, topography, predicted idling time and even individual users’ vehicles and driving styles. Users use the app as a regular GPS navigation, but also track road data on their route.
Main Features
Search + Navigation
After searching and setting the destination, it offers multiple route options in different color, also comes with estimated fuel, time, and distance on each route. A selected route gives detailed info including estimated fuel cost, comfort of driving, and road condition of the route.
In-Route GPS + Road Data Info
The route details includes estimated fuel cost, arrival time, distance, and offers re-route option. The camera icon leads to the camera capture that detects road surface anomalies through images acquired from cameras and GPS enabled-devices. After arriving, the upload button leads to uploading road data to the cloud platform.
Getting Rewarded !
After uploading, the road data will be uploaded and shared on the cloud platform, and you will get reward points for contributing!
Redeeming Rewards + Vehicle Information
Redeeming points from selected vendors in My Points section. The app also can easily calibrates the vehicle parameters using regular driving data to estimates and incorporates dynamic characteristics into the vehicle profile for data-generating purpose.
User Research + Interview + Persona
Initial Research
To understand the situation, I recruited and conducted interviews with 8 participants and learned about their driving style, behavior, and especially got to know how they utilize navigation maps such as Google Map and Waze, as well as the pain points they experienced while driving. Here are some questions asked during the interview:
• What navigation apps do you use the most and why do you like it or why don’t you like it?
• When drive, do you care the surface condition of the road? Such as bumps, crack, icy, steep, ect.
• Tell me a bad experience that you had experienced while driving.
• How often do you drive? And why do you drive? Ect. commuting, work, school, road trip.
Findings
Drivers would like to find a shorter and easier route to drive. Fuel consumption and road condition are two major factors, as they want to drive on smoother road to maintain safety and vehicle conditions.
Problem Statement
& Hypothesis
By analyzing the two perspectives from both drivers and the government, there is a need for both sides.
Opportunity &
Competitive Analysis
Current major map/navigation apps all have features such as exploring nearby, live traffic and area update, and comprehensive GPS navigations, but there has not such an app that combines the navigation with road condition monitoring/tracking function. We believe this is a great opportunity to design such app and offer convenient use.
User flow + Sitemap
User Flow &
Sitemap
Here are the user flow and sitemap when the driver uses the app as a navigation GPS and road data tracking process.
Learnings &
Reflections
It was a fun journey creating and designing this app, collaborated with the team of Glocal-Eyez. It is important to know users' behavior and combine their experience with technology to create the product that can be used widely. In the meanwhile, the use of product helps to collect up-to-date road data and information.
On the other hand, design with technology, especially cloud technology is challenging but invaluable. This product helps to reduce air pollution and protects our planet, which leads to another topic – environment pollution. I truly believe design/tech should and will play an important role in protecting our planet and I will work as hard as I can to achieve that goal.