Collision Detection

Getting drivers emergency help after detecting a car crash.

Timeline
3 months

Role
Product designer

Company
Zendrive

Product
Mobile App

Cross Functional Partners
Product management, Engineering, and Marketing

Objective

Enable drivers to quickly reach help during car crashes.

Sneak peak

Before

Previous experience with the old design system.

After

New experience with the new design system.

Executive Summary

Context

Zendrive is a B2B2C data company that uses your phone sensors to evaluate your driving behavior and detect car crashes. With over 200 billion miles of driving data collected from millions of drivers across the globe, they are able to detect when car crashes occur with >97% accuracy. Their bread and butter feature, car crash detection, was getting numerous customer complaints about the poor usability. In order to sell the value proposition of this cutting edge technology (at the time), the user experience needed a major overhaul.

Success Metrics

  • Drastically improve UX

  • Increase enterprise sales

  • Lead the product with a design-led vision

Technology

Zendrive is able to measure driving behavior and detect car crashes using your phone sensors.

Running tests with General Motors showed that Zendrive’s detection technology scored >97% in accuracy.

As soon as you experience a car crash, Zendrive notifies you to get help through the app. The app starts a countdown as soon as you open. The process is tedious as it asks for your confirmation at each step of the way, from texting your emergency contact to calling 911. 

Before

Previous flow

Pain points

From user interviews, I discovered the most significant issues. These frustrated our users so much, they would quit the app in the state of an emergency, rendering the feature useless.

  • False detections caused significant stress to both drivers and their emergency contacts. This is why the previous experience was frustrating, as permission was asked for any action (such as get help), thereby mitigating responsibility to users if Zendrive detected a crash erroneously. However, this then rendered the technology redundant.

  • This product was designed to show off data and analytics, during an era where the head of engineering was the main stakeholder. However, times have changed, and now product/design stakeholders expect stellar UX. The outdated design system severely limited the visual design, and was necessary to renovate the entire experience.

  • Copy was written from a technical standpoint and was hard to understand, especially in the mindset of someone who just experienced a car crash.

Select Iterations

Collision Detection can be set up and tested before it’s activated during a car crash.

Using previous design system components, screens were designed in yellow like the previous experience to signal a “warning state.” Users universally remarked they disliked the visual design and experience felt dated.

Key screens

Still using the previous design system components, I designed screens in black. Users liked this experience a bit more but it still felt outdated. At this point, I proposed to design a new design system instead of reusing a legacy design system.

While trying a different approach, I designed screens without reference to the previous design system. Users enjoyed this experience much more. However, the designs lacked consistent principles that could influence the rest of the product experience and establish a better design system.

User Research

At the time, there were no other feature with this technology in the consumer market. Hence, I relied heavily on user research:

1) Behavioral interviews with drivers

2) User testing with each design iteration

My scripts focused on understanding if they knew how to use the feature and if the value proposition was clear.

After

The first message to their emergency contact is automatically sent as soon as the collision detected. Consequently, every message sent after that is based on the driver’s update. If the driver marks there was no collision, the emergency contact is notified of the false alarm.

New flow

Final Designs

I created a new design system from scratch while working on parallel projects (onboarding and driver tracking). When the detection state is activated, the app is in dark mode, while the rest of product is in light mode.

Google’s Secret Project

Before Google announced this feature on Android, there was no other feature like this on the market. It was surprising to see how similar in conclusions we ended up down to the IA and dark mode.

I consider this a win, as one designer at a startup compared to a large multibillion-dollar enterprise with vast amount of resources.

My designs

Google’s designs

Launched.

Released after QA testing with engineering.

  • Presented and approved by CEO

  • Presented and approved by Senior Counsel for iOS App Store, who remarked this feature had “the potential to lead this space in terms of UX.”

  • Universally improved UX for all users tested (who now understood the value proposition for this technology)

  • Significantly increased user satisfaction

  • Increased enterprise sales


    Full case study is in presentation format. ☺

Results

First case study: