Our partnership with Verizon Connect focused on elevating their user experience and design, helping transform complex telematics data into intuitive interfaces that fleet managers actually enjoy using.
Verizon Connect is a telematics provider with a comprehensive suite of tools that allow their customers to manage fleets of vehicles. Through a long history of acquisitions and internal initiatives, over time the product had become somewhat disjoint and overwhelming, so they worked with the Uptech Studio design team to help streamline and improve the overall user experience of their products.
The importance of gaining an understanding of customers in order to develop useful products that deliver value is a well-worn mantra, but doing that in the fleet management space presents some unique challenges because there so many variables to consider, including things like:
These are just a few of the dimensions that make “understanding your customer” in the telematics industry complex. Each of these factors influences a customer’s relationship with their fleet and what they need from telematics products. So, researching and modeling how different businesses operate in order to understand why they differ and what differences actually matter as they relate to your product is not as simple as it might be for a broad-appeal consumer product.
To design a successful product that serves the unique profile of so many businesses, you need to sift through all those variables, identify the commonalities that should be served by the primary interface, and tease apart what is just a quirk at one company vs. a legitimate use case that you might need to address with secondary features (or even separate products).
Uptech Studio worked in close partnership with Verizon Connect to perform field user research and translate what we learned into actionable insights for the development team to make meaningful updates to the product.
The cornerstone of the project was extensive on-site observations and interviews with Verizon Connect's end users in their natural work environment, gathering firsthand insights into their workflows and pain points. This immersive approach allowed us to identify critical usability issues that wouldn't have been apparent through remote research methods alone.
We synthesized our research findings into comprehensive user personas that represented the diverse needs and behaviors of Verizon Connect's customer base. These personas served as essential reference points throughout the project, ensuring all design decisions were aligned with actual user needs rather than assumptions.
We created detailed journey maps illustrating how different user personas interacted with the platform across various scenarios and touchpoints. These visual representations highlighted key moments of friction and opportunity, providing a shared understanding of the user experience and guiding our prioritization of improvements.
We completely restructured the information architecture to align with users' mental models and task flows, making critical functions more discoverable and intuitive. Our revised IA simplified navigation paths, reduced cognitive load, and organized content in a way that reflected how users actually think about and approach their work.
We employed targeted testing methodologies including Card Sorting to understand users' conceptual groupings and Treejacking to validate navigation paths through the new information architecture. These structured testing approaches provided quantitative validation of our IA changes before moving into visual design phases.
We delivered a set of evidence-based design recommendations prioritized by impact and implementation feasibility. Each recommendation was tied directly to specific research findings and persona needs, giving the Verizon Connect team clear direction for improving their product experience.
We created a strategic combination of low-fidelity wireframes to rapidly test core concepts and high-fidelity design prototypes to communicate the detailed IA changes to stakeholders. This multi-tiered prototyping approach enabled efficient iteration while also providing Verizon Connect's development team with clear visual guidance for implementation.
Our partnership with Verizon Connect didn’t just help realign the product to match user’s needs and goals, but also helped shift the internal culture shift to understand the value of user research and how to connect the dots from what the product and design team was hearing from the field with changes the engineering team could make to truly serve their customers.
This engagement showcases Uptech Studio's ability to:
Apply Telematics Expertise: This project is one of several successful telematics implementations in our portfolio, demonstrating our specialized knowledge in this complex industry. Our experience across multiple telematics clients gives us unique insights into the challenges and opportunities in this space.
Create Simple Solutions for Complex Problems: We synthesized a complex set of inputs, variables, and directives for a sophisticated telematics platform into a digestible and comprehensible plan that ultimately led to an intuitive, engaging user experience that satisfies the goals of end users.
Help Effectuate Culture Change in a Large Organization: We took care to understand and navigate the internal landscape of key stakeholders and methodically built relationships that would be critical for the successful adoption of the ideas and change we knew we would ultimately be asking them to make.
Interested in other things we've written about telematics? Check out these:
