Control room dashboards to monitor trucker’s safety on the road

Client: Ahlers -  My role: Digital Product Design Lead  -  Date: 2018-2019

The transportation of luxury goods in the eastern part of Europe and Russia isn’t a walk in the park. Truckers have to fear the entire route to fall prey to robbers and for their lives. By using a smart IoT device that is installed in each truck, a control centre can monitor trucks, discover irregularities and take action when there is a suspicion of something being wrong.

Design rationale

While my colleagues at Verhaert digital were working on the IoT device, I looked into the creation of the dashboards of the control centre to monitor the trucks. We’ve held stakeholder workshops to identify all things that could go wrong, what kind of actions a control centre operator has to undertake, what information they need etc. We all documented it into a Product Requirements Document in the form of user stories. Next we categorised these on necessity into a Proof Of Concept, MVP and future version to help focus on what to design and develop first. A challenge here was be in sync with the design of the IoT tracking device. Then we created wireframes and designs while continuously checking back with the stakeholders whether certain design solutions would work for them. We tested our Proof of Concept together with the Proof of Concept of the IoT device, gathered insights and made improvements. Gradually we added more and more features to the point of having an MVP where we could launch with. Once the IoT device was ready as well, we ran a pilot track for several weeks with just ten trucks. Once again we made a few changes and the Iot Devices and control centre became fully operational. The control centre is still used today and is 24/24 being used by a team of 2 to 3 operators. The client has reported a drop in robberies.