On this page, the driver can see all the vehicles of the particular assignment. He can then pick which one to inspect first. In this example, there was just one vehicle in the assignment. We call them "Units". There can be up to 10 units per assignment.
‍

In this step, the user simply needs to select the category of the vehicle.

The next step brings you back to the tile layout similar to the old Home Screen. From here, the driver can select either to do loose items inspection or vehicle inspection or click pictures.

⛔️ ISSUE: Adding an extra click or step for the user

Loose item inspection, as the name suggests, is the inspection of quantifiable things with a simple Yes or No answer.

⛔️ ISSUE: No default state. User has to choose an answer for every question

This is where the major part of inspection begins. The driver needs to select which part of the vehicle they want to inspect first.
‍
⛔️ ISSUE: Additional clicks.

The driver needs to draw on a blueprint of the vehicle to mark where they see the damage. After that, they now have to go through 3 Additional steps to identify the damages.

1. Area: The user has to select which area of the car was damaged. For eg. front wheel, back wheel, etc.

⛔️ ISSUE: There were 21 options to choose from. Yes, 21!

2. Type: Now, the user has to select the type of damage. For eg. broken, chipped, sratched, etc.
‍
⛔️ ISSUE: There were 17 options to choose from. And majority of those options were confusing.

3. Severity: After marking the area and type, next step was to mark severity of the damage. The user had to choose from options like 2.5 inch of diameter to 5 inch of diameter, 5.0 inch of diameter to 7.5 inch of diameter.
‍
⛔️ ISSUE: There were 8 long and confusing options to choose from. Plus, these were not human readable in any way!

Once the inspection is done, the driver loads the vehicle onto the hauler truck and takes the signature of the agent in the origin digitally and takes off to the destination.

Most truck drivers and companies work on a hourly model, and for multiple companies at once. For them, the time consuming inspection meant lost business.
‍

21 options for area, 17 options for type of damages and 8 options for severity on a small device in a scroll wheel UI element in harsh weather conditions. Need I say more?
‍

As mentioned before, most of the truck drivers are not tech savvy. The choices that the old inspection had were too complicated to understand. On top of that using "codes" made it even more tough on the users.

The company works throughout the year and across all regions of North America. This means, at times, the weather conditions can be very harsh for the truck drivers to complete inspection process, or do any other tasks in the app.

Again, the most important part of this was inspection, and it got even worse during bad weather conditions.

By using a checkbox style button layout, it was faster to do loose item inspection now. The user did not have to worry about going through each option and selecting yes or no.

Instead of making the users select every side each time, it was easier to walk them through the side of the vehicle in a more natural way. This also meant they do not have to worry about making choices.

By reducing the options for damage types, area and severity, it became easier to choose amongst the fewer options presented to the user. This would set a benchmark for all future versions.

Despite reducing the options and taking away a few clicks, the process was still time consuming according to the standards we expected.

Drawing lines on an image to mark damage was still tough because of larger thumb sizes and harsh weather conditions.

The idea was to take the orientation fixed so that the users do not need to change it again and again. But, in portrait orientation, it was difficult to fit the entire image by standing close to the car. The driver needed to go back so that they can cover the entire portion of the side.

Some of the clients need atleast 4 photographs to be taken. By giving the option of "No Damage", it might hurt their business, and hence it was important to incorporate that into the revised designs.

There were some elements from the previous iteration that worked well. It was important to retain those and give them some final finishing touches with respect to the UI.

Here's how that went

The issues with the vehicle inspection found in Iteration 1 needed to be improved. Goal was to make the process faster, less confusing, and easy to navigate.

This is how it turned out :) 

Refined the UI for the final screens and made the process smooth from start to end!

Soon after finishing the designs, I decided to quit CarsArrive to pursue a new opportunity. This was my last hoorah with the wonderful team at CarsArrive.

I was so grateful for this opportunity as this was a big project at such an early stage of my career.

I had left the company by the time the app launched, but I was still in touch with my manager, Pradeep, and constantly asked him about any feedback that we received for the new app.

There were not many quantifiable outcomes except the inspection time.
Overall, I was able to help make the inspection 4 times faster than the original inspection.

Other than that, users were really happy with the new workflow, and I will keep updating this page once I get hold of more reviews.
‍

Restrictions should not bog me down
Despite limited resources, and restrictions, I am proud of the product that I was able to create. I kept working hard, did plenty of research and came up with solutions efficiently.

Learning from competitors
I used to be a very egotistic designer in my early days thinking that my approach is better than others. However, working at CarsArrive and doing competitive research meant that I could take inspiration from other companies and improve upon them rather than turning the wheel.

Should have added haptics, micro-interactions, animations
Limited resources, plus a lack of knowledge in micro-interactions and animations meant that the product was missing that last bit of oomph factor.