A fleet management system used by Itaipu for its internal electric car-sharing system. In less than 6 years it registered more than 15.000 trips with a combined total of over 80.000 kilometers driven on its 40+ electric car fleet.

The problem

The original MoVE platform was showing signs of its age.

As the fleet grew and so did its use, it became increasingly difficult for Itaipu's management to gather relevant data from the platform. Developers were also having issues servicing the current application, initially built back in 2016 using a combination of Angular.js with an old version of the Material UI library.

What could we do to fix the current issues and future-proof the platform?

Challenges

1. The contract for MoVE's support would expire in a little less than 4 months.
2. We are limited by the amount of data that can be collected by sensors installed on the cars and by the actions that can be performed by our custom-built hardware unit.
3. Due to timing constraints, we couldn't propose changes that relied on updates to the backend or the hardware's firmware.

After careful consideration, MoVE's team decided to rebuild its web interface using React and more recent technologies that would allow for better serviceability over the years. It would also be the perfect time to redesign certain aspects of the UI, fixing complaints received by the current development team.

A screen capture showing how MoVE used to look. Due to compliance and privacy reasons, all data on this and future screen captures got changed to randomly generated ones.

Ideation

As the only designer for this project, I weighted the challenges, limitations, and the backlog of proposed improvements. After briefing the development team and sorting our priorities, we decided to keep the scope of the project to a UI rework, with minimal changes to the navigation.

This initial process saved us a lot of time as we didn't have to go through the traditional "discover" and "define" phases as we already had both a fully working application running and a list of things that should be improved upon. Ideation was focused on what would make certain tasks easier rather than thinking about new processes or hierarchies.

The design process

Since day one my two main goals were:

1. Improve data views for the most important areas of the application, introducing contextual data and easy-to-use actions;
2. Update interface elements making the overall UI more modern and sleek without creating a burden on the developers.

To achieve this, I started thinking about what was wrong with MoVE: what felt old, out of place, or simply didn't seem to work that well. As someone who never used the platform, I had a fresh point of view and was free of "excuses" or "workarounds".