Why and how we built a live demo of HyperTrack dashboard
Back in April, in this blog post, we explained the design philosophy behind the HyperTrack dashboard. Over last two months, we got the dashboard ready for our early users. Today, we are excited to make the live demo available to all our users. Visit dashboard.hypertrack.io/demo to look at what we have built.
Why is it important to have a live demo?
As we started talking to users interested in trying HyperTrack, the first question that came up was “Can I play around with the dashboard? Can I touch and feel the dashboard before I take the effort to integrate?”.
The idea of exposing a live dashboard to our prospective users seemed risky. We were going to showcase a product that was not yet fully baked. But as we reflected back on the kind of company and product we had set out to build, we realized that having a demo dashboard is essential. Users expect that we would always say good things about our own product. Letting users experience it through a live demo helps build trust that the product delivers the promise.
Once we decided to have a live demo of the dashboard, our next challenge was to produce generous amounts of data that reflects real life drivers, end customers, tasks and trips.
Generating profiles of drivers and customers
Two key entities of our dashboard are drivers and end customers. A driver is the person you want to track and a customer is the person expecting the driver to show up for a pickup or delivery. Generating hundreds of driver and customer profiles, with names, photos, etc. could be demanding, not to mention boring. Our team explored various options, but eventually found a free, open-source API for generating random user data — randomuser.me. It is a simple to use API that outputs JSON user data. It provides a bunch of toggles to configure the output. For example, since we just needed the profile picture and name in the JSON, this is the call we made: https://randomuser.me/api/?inc=name,picture
Generating tasks and trips
We recently open sourced the HyperTrack python helper library. The library made the job of creating drivers, destinations, tasks, etc. super simple. Within a few minutes, we were able to create ~20 drivers, ~30 destinations and ~150 tasks. But the data we generated modeled an ideal world with all trips on time. Since we had to model the real world in the demo, we randomly made a few of our drivers late.
How to play with demo dashboard
Here are snapshots of what you would see when you log-in into the demo dashboard.
- Live Dashboard: The home screen of the dashboard is a live summary of your business right now. Besides the day’s aggregates like number of orders delivered, pending or running late, you would see a list of drivers that are currently en route a live trip. Due to proactive alerts about orders running late, this becomes the default screen for operation managers to stare at.
- Live Trips: Clicking on live trips would show you details of all the tasks assigned to that trip, customer destinations for those tasks, statuses of individual tasks, and so on. If you see a driver running late, this trip detail page would give the most updated ETAs of the pending tasks.
- Drivers & Fleets: This section of the dashboard helps analyze on-time performance and utilization of drivers and fleets. You can analyze how a driver is doing compared to his fleet. Metrics like these help your operations team answer questions like which of your drivers make deliveries on time most often or which drivers are under utilized.
- Past Trips: All historical trip can be audited to see what exactly happened on that trip. You can replay a full trip as many times you like, rewind a driver’s trip and look at his exact location at specific times. This would help you find any blind spots in your operations — that was missed by automated alert systems.
- Customers: This section of the dashboard helps analyze your pickup and delivery performance with respect to customers and neighborhoods. You can analyze service levels for the most loyal customers or for new customers. You can also compare your on-time performance by neighborhoods or see which ones are underserved.
- Analytics: This section of the dashboard analyzes your operations over days, weeks and months. You can see heatmaps of your busiest neighborhoods and performance of your business across these neighborhoods.
With a demo dashboard, we also hope to provide our users a sample of how a dashboard would look once you leverage various advanced features of our services like adding multiple tasks to a trip, assigning drivers to a fleet, creating hubs, and so on.
We hope that you would love the demo of the dashboard, and would give HyperTrack a shot. If you like what you see, request access to HyperTrack here.
