Samsara - 2020 - Lead Designer

Helping fleets reduce their fuel use

Background

Samsara is an Internet of Things (“IoT”) company that combines wireless sensors and software to help fleet companies operate more efficiently, safely, and sustainably. I worked on this project while I was in London, helping figure out how to build product market fit within the Europe region.

Problem

During the pandemic, fuel costs were skyrocketing and it quickly became was the top operational cost for fleets.

Fleet managers were feeling uneasy about the economic climate. They wanted to gain visibility on how they can decrease costs.

Discovery

Prior to this project, the only data that existed on the Samsara platform was a circle widget that told fleet managers how much fuel was used. Naturally, we got a lot of feedback on how useless this dial was.  
So we took a deeper look.

Through interviews, we found that customers were already exporting data through our API and making their custom spreadsheets.

That’s when we knew there was a need.

Process

In this project, we took an iterative MVP-first approach. We kept the MVP scope to launching a fuel efficiency report first and then spoke to customers to make sure we were on the right track before we spent too much time building the wrong thing. Our hypothesis is that the insights in the report should still add value to our customers. If it didn’t, then it’s better we find out sooner rather than later!

Research

I was able to speak to get on the phone with several of our most vocal customers to better understand their need. 

Key Insights

Need driver-specific fuel usage data
Usage needed to be broken into categories e.g. idling vs. speeding so customers can understand the “why”
Need to identify behavior patterns and outliers throughout the fleet
Need to measure progress over time so they can see whether company program changes resulted in improvements

Design

Driver Efficiency Report

The Driver Efficiency Report is used by fleet managers understand current fuel usage and potential key areas for improvements.

Drivers play a large part in the performance of the vehicles they’re driving. The driver efficiency report was launched to give fleet managers easy visibility on how well their fleet is doing, how well their fleet is doing over time, and which driving behavior contributed the most to fuel usage.

With this information, fleet managers are able to coach and incentivize their drivers toward more efficient driving behavior and reduce their fuel and maintenance costs. By helping them understand exactly what goes into a score, they can see how they are being evaluated along with ways to improve.

Configuring scores

During user research calls, customers were really excited about the new driver efficiency report but there was a consistent theme that arose. Customers had mixed fleets, which means that they had drivers driving 72-ft semi trucks as well as passenger vans. Both of which would get very different MPG.

Samsara had 10,000+ customers globally with very different vehicles makeups. This was a problem that needed to be solved. Customers just wanted scores to be accurate. So we designed a way for customers to customize what factors they wanted to be included in a score and the ability to customize vehicle profiles to give them full control of the metrics that matter to them.

Customer Testimonials

“Samsara’s Eco-Driving features support us to coach and train our drivers on the importance of fuel efficiency which allows us to save on fuel costs for our business”

— Daniel Coleman, Fleet Support and Transport Manager
A.W. Jenkinson
Coaching drivers on their driving drove the change for us. We’re well above a mile a gallon since we started and we’ve been able to set parameters for incentive and fuel bonus programs.”

- Alan Hewell, Fleet manager at Mar-Jac Transportation