Equipment Management
Fleetio wanted to launch its first add-on product to allow fleet managers to manage their equipment in the same system they already utilized for managing their vehicles.
The challenge
A cross-functional, four member squad was formed to work directly with the CEO. We understood from the start that this would be Fleetio's first of many planned add-on products, which introduced a number of challenges:
- Introduce a new pricing model.
- Reuse as much existing code as possible.
- Provide the right amount of functionality.
Customer interviews and discovery
We set up weekly customer calls to build a deep understanding of customer needs, test new pricing models and functionality, and help them get up and running with the beta version as it was developed. Through our early discovery, we learned how to define Equipment and how it differed from our Vehicle and Parts offerings. Based on some prior industry research we'd conducted as well as early talks with customers and our own internal discussions, we chose to the lawn care industry as our initial target industry. We chose to focus on small equipment, not large equipment such as cranes, etc.
Accountability
From our initial discussions with customers, we began to understand that the biggest differentiator from our vehicles offering should be around equipment tracking and accountability. I began sketching and wireframing flows that would allow customers to track their equipment without checking in/out each individual piece.
Mobile wireframing
During this process, I was also working with the mobile squad on UX for how equipment would work on our native mobile apps.
Blank slate illustrations
Along the way, I established a few app-wide patterns that were implemented across the application. Here is a set of icons I designed for blank slate states that I initially designed for equipment, but were turned into components and introduced across the entire app.
Equipment icons
A small set of equipment-related icons I designed to add to our standard set of icons.
Feature overviews
I also designed an educational onboarding component to help ease customers into the Equipment module, as well as provide some additional context such as what is Equipment vs. Vehicles, etc. These were also implemented throughout the application.
Success
It took approximately 2 months to go from idea to launched beta product with many both new and existing customers trialing and converting to paid within a 14-day trial period. The Equipment squad was deemed a success, and was used as a model for how to quickly launch other big projects.
