Samba Safety
Reversing customer attrition by shifting from visual effects to evidence-based, scannable fleet risk management.
- UX
- UI
- Research & Testing
- Enterprise
This project is a enterprise case study for Pivotal Labs.
The Problem
Samba Safety helps companies manage driver risk and fleet compliance—verifying & managing certifications, checking for DUIs, and more. But despite being vital to thousands of clients, their app prioritized flashy UI over usability (charts & dashboards), driving customers away with clunky workflows and confusing charts.
Research & Lessons
Samba was panicked and falling behind competitors, wanting to leapfrog rather than fix today's problems. We convinced them to first understand how customers actually did their jobs—not what Samba Safety thought users wanted.
We had two months to deliver a concept that was mature enough that development could start the very next day.
We made sure to interview users from a variety of domains - Samba Safety is used by everyone from Fedex to school districts, and while the domains are different, clear workflows emerged.
We taught their team contextual inquiry, synthesis, and ruthless prioritization, using lean principles to make an MVP that was useful and a foundation for future states.
We made sure to include the Samba Safety team in all of our design workshops - showing them 'behind the curtain' helped them understand the constraints we were balancing, and feeling a part of the design process helped them feel invested in the features we were proposing.
We put prototypes in front of users, embraced being wrong, and shifted them from a state of fear to one of excitement. Knowing beats guessing.
Dashboard
The #1 problem with dashboard or overview experiences is their lack of actionable information. Don't overload your users with every possible piece of data or loads of charts; give them just enough information to make choices about what to work on next, and you keep the 'noise' of the interface low.
Iconography was liberally used, but intentionally discoverable - shapes were chosen to be easily identifiable between each other, and every icon either had a tooltip or was paired with a description elsewhere in the application.
Driver Profile
Users needed to be able to look at a driver's profile and know within seconds what the situation was and how to remediate any problems. Across the application color was focused on highlighting problems or making things scannable, and ornamentation was kept to a minimum.
Inline Editing
Rather than doing popover or dialogs, we made the add/edit state of the driver profile all inline - users don't need to reorient themselves to a modal.
Given the variety of domains this product supported, lots of fields were optional - rather than having lots of open inputs competing with one another, we tucked most of them being simple 'add' interactions (in future iterations, we allowed customers to set default fields that would be open without the interaction).