With a tight budget and limited timeline, we (the team at Clever°Franke) designed and developed an interactive real-time dashboard that allowed traffic controllers to monitor and analyze traffic flows within their city.
My role:
Lead UX Designer + Product Owner
2018
BlueMac designs and builds sensors that capture live traffic flow data including travel times, speed, and origin destination. Its sensors are used for analysis by leading transportation agencies worldwide. BlueMac's analysis tool helps traffic managers to improve traffic flow in their cities and empowers them to make informed decisions.
We were asked to research, define, design and build the next evolution of the tool's core user experience.
The existing tool only provided basic monitoring, was highly restricted by the technology platform, and lacked many of the features that were crucial to the target audience. Through a series of interviews with traffic engineers, traffic controllers, and city planners, we gained a better understanding of their day-to-date activities, needs, pain points, and mapped opportunities for future improvements to the tool.
BlueMac bluetooth tracking sensors placed along traffic corridors
capture the MAC address of passing cars via the devices of the occupants or from the car itself. As the car travels through different traffic corridors, multiple BlueMac sensors register the same device and are able to show the travel time of the vehicle. We used anonymized data from BlueMac's API to build a front-end application to empower traffic controllers to see travel times and a variety of other metrics in real-time.
Through our research we mapped out what the complete experience would be for a BlueMac customer. This structure and flow entailed several new features and sections specific to different customer audiences. The three sections consisted of live traffic analysis, traffic studies, and sensor setup and management. With limited budget and time we focused on live traffic analysis and sensor setup and management for the upcoming design and development sprints.
We created a map based interface where the user could not only see what traffic flows and corridors are being tracked, but can also directly interact with the sensors, routes, and segments to discover new insights and easily troubleshoot any issues.
One of the biggest improvements was the new onboarding experience where in a few simple steps you could connect to a newly placed sensor and attach it to new or existing routes and segments.
In only four development sprints we were able to bring the interface to life. The new interface and functionality gave BlueMac a competitive edge and allowed them to not only serve their clients better but pursue new clients with their improved offering.
