I lead and established the entire design of FleetLogic [SaaS], a Rental Management Software built for coordinating inventory, service documentation, and field teams. It was primarily created for managing construction equipment, but while I was there, I discovered and proposed opportunies for us to expand this towards serving other fields and rental practices.
Due to non-disclosure, the material here is limited and only from the 2017-2019 releases.
Prior to FleetLogic, Texada Software (the founding company) had primarily been offering SRM, a complete on-premises management software.
Despite how extensive and powerful its management capabilities were, the company was losing customers to competitors due to shortcomings such as:
1. Outdated and complex UI
2. Difficult maintenance and upgradability
3. Poor user experience: customers often required several rounds of training
4. The extensive feature set was intimidating for most of their small and mid-sized customers, many of whom found no use nor value in paying for the advanced functionality
Overall, the company may have once been industry leaders but have since fallen behind their competition due to their inability to adapt to today's standards.
I was the Product Design Lead for this endeavour, and, for the first 3 months, I was also a solo UX/UI designer among a team of 7 developers. While I had support from the head of product, this meant that I had to get creative with the resources we had in order to get things done. I was not one to force new management styles for the sake of trends, but as I noticed that their waterfall approach had also been a crux to the company’s inflexibility, I sought to leverage their technical skills through a more agile (or at least more iterative) approach, so that we can gather quick wins to build up our momentum.
FleetLogic was Texada’s second attempt at recovering from their loss of market share. Despite gaining an investor out of HirePool from their proof-of-concept (FL), they lost all 7 other customers within a month of release. Thus, my role was to lead and improve our design in order to attract new customers and retain FleetLogic users. Apart from reaching out to our users, I also needed to align with 2 important sources to define clear goals for FleetLogic's long-term success:
1. Improve Usability and Establish Clear User Flows
2. Define Interface Design (Build a Style Guide and a Design Library)
3. Optimize Feature Set: In comparison to SRM, this will be a lighter but more focused software that can eventually be modularized
4. Eventually lay the foundation to migrate all SRM capabilities into FleetLogic
1. Make it easily understandable so that training need not be required and to reduce support calls per user
2. Update UI to a degree that would make it more attractive than the competition
3. Condense Offerings in order to Reduce Pricing per User/Company
4. Long-term: transfer all SRM Customers to FleetLogic as doing so would be more cost-effective for customers but also more profitable for the company
Aligning these goals gave me clear targets to ensure the survival of FleetLogic as we undergo intense initial testing/product market fit,
but also to define milestones for success amongst our clients and their users.
As we already had a “running MVP” to leverage, I sought to save time by auditing what we had and morphing it into something more usable and testable.
Once we had better feedback and a higher rate of confidence in FleetLogic, then that is when we would dedicate the resources to properly set up a
much more desirable interface.
These are the components of FleetLogic back in June 2017, when I joined. I believe that it had a lot of potential, but still clearly lacked
a solid design direction that retained users.
Apart from Hirepool, we spoke to other clients, both past and current, for feedback on FleetLogic:
1. Being built online made it easily accessible
2. Less intimidating due to minimal feature set
3. Much newer design in comparison
1. Had a lot of bugs
2. Does not perform the way it was “sold” to them
3. No clear purpose nor direction for it yet
4. Inability to use it by itself (to use FleetLogic, these same users also had to use SRM to create the Work Orders managed there)
It was encouraging to learn that a majority of our previous customers were still interested in the concept, but saw that the product itself was still premature.
They experienced more headaches than benefits and could not find a proper use for the new platform.
Armed with direct feedback from our clients, I sought to align all of their goals together and incorporate them into a more purposeful approach to FleetLogic. Essentially, I wanted to define just what it was used for, whose needs were resolving with it, and why they would choose us over the competition
After several rounds of ideation and use case walkthroughs, I began to find patterns in our users’ behaviours. As straightforward as it sounds,
a majority of them spend the most amount of their efforts on submitting information regarding their inventory, updating their inventory,
renting them out for business reasons, and coordinating these equipment levels between other locations. All of these activities can be achieved
with the use of 2 primary tools:
1. Sorting through LISTS and
2. Filling out FORMS
Simple as these may be, it gave our team a basis for what to build our processes on for FleetLogic. This gave me a foundation for the features
to wireframe and the flows from the use cases these formed.
Thanks to these findings that allowed me to restructure FleetLogic’s focus and overall information architecture, my team and I were ready to tackle these new flows in high-fidelity
I worked alongside the marketing team as well as our PM’s to define a theme not only consistent to the software but to our overall branding. Accessibility, primarily the importance of readability and much easier consumption of large bodies of information, helped define Typography and spacing measures.
Once the style guide and flows were set, I enlisted the help of our product team once again to present and interview our users (as I had been able to establish
a weekly focus group) with the new hi-fidelity mockups.
In recognizing 2 common practices in Lists and Forms, I built a base for each of these processes that allowed me to delegate these to our PM’s and front-end developers.
This made it much faster for us to deploy potential new screens to test as well as give me more time to wireframe other features. We settled on a concentrated feature
base to start off our soft launch with, and then we can gradually add to that over time.
Unlike its initial (hard) launch, we were received by customers more warmly given that we had already been in constant contact with them. Slowly, but surely, the team began to feel like we were en route to taking our market back. We had a soft launch early in the year but publicly, it was released this on to the market on October 2018
a.Sign on 5 customers within the first month and over 200 new users before the end of 2018
b. Established an 80% retention rate
c. Significantly reduced the need for in-person training
d. Interest from new market segment (Guitar Centre, Home Hardware, etc)
a. Team Expansion: We hired 2 more designers, 2 PM’s and 7 new developers.
We even split our team in order to have a team dedicated to mobile, and another towards RentalLogic (an even more condensed version of FleetLogic)
b. Our PM’s and front-end/full-stack devs became more comfortable with design
c. I also sought to build a better relationship with support throughout all this as they were the first line of defense when it came to customer complaints
d. Expand our offerings all while providing a means for the company to finally migrate current customers from their outdated software
e. More customer feedback (Test-it Tuesdays)
I was overwhelmed by the response from the market, especially given how slow to change most members of our community were. However, I was more so thrilled by the growth we experienced by this, not only showcasing the demand for our product but also how truly impactful our product was to our users, both new and returning.