Project Description
I designed Motional's first field support product. The tool enabled fully driverless rides by eliminating the dependency on in-vehicle safety operators. Specialists now respond to in-field vehicle issues ~7x faster than before.
In advance of fully driverless launch (no safety operator in the driver's seat!), I worked with a cross-functional team including a researcher, product managers, and engineers in order to identify the needs of field-support specialists, test conceptual designs, and launch a new solution. Now specialists use real-time data to remotely monitor a vehicle and receive an alert when their assistance is required.
The Team & My Role
Lead Designer - Me!
Senior User Researcher - Helen-Argiroff-Flood
Lead Product Manager - Sarah Ishman
Senior Product Manager - Kathryn Denman
Platform
Responsive web
The “Problem”
Before the project, the field support team depended on in-vehicle operators to manually send a message when the vehicle experienced an error. Specialists were limited to on-site troubleshooting using the vehicle’s internal computer system and HMI.
The process was incompatible with driverless operations as the vehicle operators would no longer be present to notify the field support team or drive the AV to the staging area for troubleshooting.
~15 minute delay to start troubleshooting while AV is driven to waiting specialist
Goal
Design a tool and a process for field support specialists to enable rapid response to in-field issues.
Exploratory Research
I learned about the current field support process and identified users’ future needs for driverless missions through a series of workshops with operations team representatives.
What steps, tools, and actors are included in the current process? How do we imagine it will evolve in the fully driverless future?
We uncovered what contributed to issues in the field and how the specialists responded during workshops with the operations team.
Field support team members outlined their ideal "future state" support flow in storyboarding sessions.
The team created operational workflows to document steps that specialists should take depending on the passenger status and autonomous capability of the vehicle.
I identified consistent steps in each of the workflows and created a high-level map to document the phases and key actions from all actors involved in the field support service.
Field support team members outlined their ideal "future state" support flow in storyboarding sessions.
Role & Requirement Definition
The team hypothesized about what information the field support specialists needed in order to understand errors and confidently take action to resolve issues while in the field.
As a field support specialist actively supporting an AV, I have access to a set of controls and AV health information so that I can resolve the scenario and assist passengers.
Information Needed
Error type
Current location of AV
Vehicle controls such as closing and locking doors
Ride share controls like canceling the current or upcoming ride
Passenger seatbelt status
AV health status indicators like localization and gear state
Concept Generation
I designed concepts that included the information that specialists needed in order to understand and respond to vehicle issues. The concepts varied in how specialists would navigate to and review the vehicle information.
One concept added a guided checklist experience within the current fleet monitoring application. The second concept was a customized page focused on a single vehicle.
Unified Fleet Monitoring Checklist Concept
New tab for Field Support added to vehicle details
Additional health details added to current fleet monitoring tool so that specialists can review details to determine potential resolution
Checklist guides specialists through steps to interact with passengers and resolve scenario
Specialist able to navigate to other vehicles in fleet to review details
Custom Page for Parallel Path
Page only shows content for one vehicle at a time allowing the specialist to focus solely on their assigned vehicle
Details of specialists actions are reported in the fleet monitoring tool creating a "parallel path" for specialists and fleet monitors and supervisors
Stakeholder Feedback
I reviewed the concepts with stakeholders from the product, safety, operations, and engineering teams to gather feedback. Operations and safety leaders determined the operating model for driverless ops would include 1 trail vehicle with a specialist for every driverless vehicle.
After reviewing the concepts and the details of the driverless operating model, I recommended that the team move forward with the second concept focusing on a single vehicle to create the best experience for specialists.
Concept Testing
Specialists were familiar with a tool that only showed vehicle error information, so I focused on designing concepts that displayed new information such as passenger status and vehicle body signals.
The designs were shared with 5 current field support specialists. Specialists felt that the combined vehicle diagram with all body signals and controls was easiest to understand.
Body Signals & Controls Diagram
The diagram combined all body signals like seat occupancy, seatbelt status, and door lock statuses
Actions were shown contextually within each card
Body Signals Cards
Cards for each body signal were shown with the error states such as unbuckled seatbelts shown at the top of the list
All actions available in global menu
Solution
After applying key findings from concept testing, I created detailed designs and shared them with the engineering team so that we could build the first version.
The final solution allows specialists to receive error notifications, review the vehicle’s health details, and take action to assist passengers and return the AV to service.
Troubleshoot AV Health Issues
A notification informs the specialist about the issue. The specialist reviews health details to troubleshoot potential fixes.
Assist Passengers & Ride Share Partners
The specialist dispatches a new ride for passengers or pauses ride share services to prevent a delayed backlog.
Take Action to Support Passengers
The specialist reviews the vehicle's current state to evaluate the safety of the scene and takes action to lock or close doors if needed.
Evaluating the Solution
During end-to-end testing on a closed course, we tested the AV’s capability and evaluated the usability of the new tool with an updated standard operating procedure.
Expect the Unexpected
You know what they say about best laid plans... After one day of testing the tool in a live environment connected to the vehicle, the vehicle's software became unstable due to a new release. I needed to come up with a Plan B.
I created a series of clickable prototypes to cover our planned testing scenarios. Creating detailed Figma components allowed me to quickly create the prototypes so that our team could still assess the tool and standard operating procedure.
In testing sessions, specialists were able to review error details and take action to resolve issues in 9 different scenarios.
Updates after testing focused on streamlining the SOP documentation and clarifying error language.
That’s me!
Launch
Testing proved the tool was ready for launch. In the fall of 2023, field support specialists starting using it for all driverless missions.
Impact After Launch
Specialists now respond to issues in the field 7x faster than before.
The system has a 100% success rate of sending notification with an average of ~7 minutes from notification to resolution.
2 minutes
avg time from notification to field support arrival
Previously took 10-15 minutes to drive AV to field support staging area for troubleshooting
7-12 seconds
avg time between error occurring on vehicle to specialist being notified
Previously specialist waited for a manual update from vehicle operators via Slack
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