Fleet management got better with the Simha kit!
Covid had put a hold on everything! But the Innovation at Carnot Technologies is an exception. We started working remotely but our efficiency was not sacrificed nor our hunger for innovation. This post covers the design journey of one such innovation realized during the lockdown.
Simha Kit, our flagship product, is loved and accepted by the farmers but we stumbled across a challenge. What about the many medium/large sized sugar factories, mills, and agri-business centers that own a fleet of 20–50 tractors?
The challenge was — how can we bring a behavior change with something as simple as fleet management, but to an audience which has never gone beyond excel sheets? Besides the obvious problems of UX and tech in viewing information of 50 tractors in 2G enabled low-end mobile phones, we needed something that showcases complicated information in a seemingly simple way.
We had two options either to optimize the phone app for the 50-tractors use cases or to release a desktop version. In the team discussion, we realize that launching a desktop version would make more sense as the fleet manager spends most of their time on a desktop and the web version can be accessed from anywhere on any OS.
A meeting was set up between Software Engineers, Developers, Designers & Stakeholders to discuss the features and vision of the product and the outcome was to release the MVP version of the Simha-kit Android App equivalent for the desktop.
We started exploring ideas for the layout considering the use cases.
We listed out a bunch of features based on our competitor research but as this was the first release we wanted to ship our product with the essential features and built on it based on our user feedback.
The question was, which are actually essential features? Which would be good to have? Which to push for the future release?
We constantly perform user research to improve our products and this proved to be handy when deciding on the essential features.
On doing initial user research and checking the analytics of mobile app, it was obvious that the first thing fleet users do is search by their vehicle name/driver name/number plate/model name, in a hope of landing on the information of that specific vehicle.
Given that we are talking about tractors, the decision to keep the map with the option of satellite view as the placeholder/landing was quite natural and a user can simply navigate the map to select and view tractors.
We usually scan a screen from Left to Right. Hence, we kept the list of tractors at the left so the first thing the users see is the list of tractors. A user can easily scan the list as they are pictorial with the Company & Model name and if a user decides to do a quick sort/filter they can easily do it using the filter on the top right of the list.
Scrolling to see more content is the natural behavior used by tech giants like Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, and that’s what you are doing right now on Medium as well 😉 We decided to leverage this behavior, So a user simply has to scroll to see more tractors.
When a user clicks on a Tractor, the information slides-in in a card style that feels organic and guides the user’s eye. When the user clicks on a particular tractor, the other tractors’ information is minimized, though the tractor image can be seen so the user can browse, and click the tractor images to switch between the tractors.
Simha Fleet Management is built using modern web technology — React hence you will experience a smooth User interface with no lag in data.
We have launched Simha Fleet Management and waiting for more insights from our users. Want to give it a try? Drop us a mail — report@carnot.co.in
