SuperControl

My Role

Team Lead & Designer

Duration

4 months, Sep. 2021 - Dec. 2022

Team Member

Charmaine Qiu (Collaborative Designer), Chukwumaobim Nnaeto (Collaborative Designer)

Advisor

Wayne Chung, Chryssa Hunlock, Klara Oberhollenzer, Milena Boytchef, Jay Penev

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Daimler Truck North America is a leading company in autonomous truck. They challenged the students on the course, Tools for UX Design, to design a mission control system that supports future truck dispatchers to provide remote assistance for autonomous trucks.

As the team lead and designer of the team, I guided the team throughout the process of background research, conducting interviews, developing research models, ideation, and iterations.

Our Project Timeline

DESIGN GOAL

Help Truck Dispatchers Step into a Better Future

Autonomous truck is future. However, there are still situations that require human support during the process, such as task assignment, system monitoring, remote assistance, and departure & arrival clearance. Super Control is an all-in-one platform that includes dispatching system, monitoring system, and remote control system in order to support dispatchers to conduct complex tasks with efficiency.

CLIENT FEEDBACK

Invited to present to their internal teams

After presenting to Daimler North America team, we received positive feedback for the practicability of our design and the visual execution.

Background

The Trucking Industry is an essential part of the US and global economy. Currently, 94% traffic accidents are caused by human factors, such as driver fatigue. More than 50% of trucks are not utilized on the road. Moreover, there will be more than 167% of drivers shortage in the labor market in 2028 than in 2018. Autonomous truck is the key solution to address these challenges by requiring fewer human drivers’ operations, increasing efficiency in route planning, and promoting digitalization in the logistics sector. However, autonomous trucks cannot cut humans out of the loop. It requires dispatchers to not only assign virtual drivers but also supervising trucks in motion.

CHALLENGE

How Might We provide Integrated and Efficient strategies for Dispatchers to provide Remote Assistance to autonomous trucks?

Highlighted Experiences

Dispatching Orders & Departure Clearance

Nudge users to take action via notifications about new-coming orders
Visualize truck parameters to facilitate dispatchers' decision-making

Truck Monitoring

Quickly locate trucks with a multi-dimension filter
Inform dispatchers with concrete road conditions through live cameras

Remote Assistance

Report dangers with salient visual changes
Provide users with step-by-step guidance based on the context
Ease communication with different stakeholders in an all-in-one chat window

Remote Restart

Guide users to restart smoothly through an instructional checklist

Research

SUMMARY

Considering both the Users and their Context

Our primary users are truck dispatchers. From our stakeholder map, truck dispatchers are within a huge system and required to interact with different parties to successfully manage trucks.

Therefore, we conducted research from two angles: Understand the User & Understand the Context.

UNDERSTAND THE USERS

Collecting data from multiple resources

Instead of collecting all data from scratch, we inherited some data from the Daimler team to picture the lives of dispatchers and understand their needs.

Contextual Inquiries

using direct storytelling with current dispatchers who work
in Daimler

Interviews

with a Daimler administrator and an autonomous vehicle expert

Diary Studies

on the diaries and work logs of 9 dispatchers over a week

Survey Studies

from 242 participants, which include the drivers, dispatchers, and planners

Who are dispatchers?

We fleshed out the dispatcher persona to help us empathize with dispatchers‘ great pressure from their long daily work time.

What challenges are dispatchers facing?

Our collected data presented us dispatchers’ daily life. By using an affinity diagram, we further gained the insights into dispatchers’ needs for the mission control system.

Frustration 01

Lack of Support

Dispatchers do not necessarily have truck-driving experience. They need support when facing heterogeneous road conditions.

Frustration 02

Sick of Noisy Technology

Dispatchers need to operate many different systems, which makes them sick of noisy technology.

Frustration 03

Great Stress

Dispatchers are under great stress. They need top deal with many logistics and cannot achieve a good work-life balance.

UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT

Workflow of Dispatching Autonomous Trucks

Under Hub2Hub strategy, dispatchers are in charge of assigning orders to virtual drivers available in the hubs and supervising the entire autonomous mission process. We mapped out dispatchers’ workflow to guide our end-to-end design. Our design addressed the challenges that dispatchers will face in their tasks at Stage 1 and Stage 2. The arrival clearance task at Stage 3 is similar to the departure clearance task at Stage1, therefore sharing the same design essence.

Painpoint 01

Dense Transfer Work

Dispatchers need to follow the progress of various issues and ensure these issues are resolved. Every issue requires a lot of coordination between different stakeholders.

Painpoint 02

Complex Situation

Dispatchers have to make decisions within seconds when emergency comes, while the condition could be very complex.

Painpoint 03

Low Efficiency

Dispatchers need to monitor tons of information and make matching among them.

DESIGN IDEATION #1

Low-fi Iterations on Information Architecture

Combining with our research on autonomous truck, we started from laying out all information that needs to be displayed. With the static display at hand, we moved on to finalize the information architecture.

Key Problems 1

HMW Match Related Information on Different Screens?

Information on different screens is overlapped, which caused users’ confusion
While orders are the main focus for dispatchers, information in this area is not enough

Distinguished the functions of each screen
Added necessary entries in the information center

Key Problems 2

HMW Match Reduce Unnecessary Information?

Provide too much information which is insignificant, which causes a lot of visual noise (i.e, users cannot make sense of looking at a lot of maps)
Users cannot be directed to a specific target easily

Got rid of insignificant information- Organized into “Dispatch View” and “Monitor View” to facilitate dispatchers under different scenarios
Included a filter system to help dispatchers quickly locate and find their targets

Key Problems 3

HMW Increase the continuity of the display and demonstrate the purpose of each screen?

Monitor view is the last area to be noticed with this layout (as users usually look from left to right)
Not enough truck performing indicators

Reorganized system layout to highlight the monitor view and help dispatchers focus
Added more required performing indicators to visualize necessary parameters

DESIGN IDEATION #2

Mid-fi Iterations On End-to-End User Flow

According to the previous workflow, we concluded that there are 3 major stages for dispatchers' work: Pre-Mission, On the Road and Post-Mission. And our main focus is Pre-Mission and On the Road.

Key Problems 1

HMW support dispatchers when they are assigning orders?

Redundant and useless filter that fails to help dispatchers locate trucks
Lack of support for departure clearance

Redefined filter categories according to message sent from planner with customizable options
Added an explicit checklist to scaffold dispatchers smoothly finish departure clearance

Key Problems 2

HMW inform users about the functions they could employ to monitor trucks?

Users are confused about whether the camera view is live or not
Users do not know know they could switch between 3 views and complains that the other 2 views are too small

Added salient icons to indicate state and action for different views

Key Problems 3

HMW inform users about the functions they could employ to monitor trucks?

Users feel confused when the guidance appears under different place
Emergent stop function being inaccessible

Constraint the guidance in a specific area to avoid adding cognitive load for dispatchers
Highlighted emergency stop button

CRAFTING THE DESIGN

Execute on the High-fidelity Prototypes

Since dispatchers are looking at the screens all day long during their work, and the system they currently use during their work is dark system, we decided to use dark mode as the default visual style.
We referred to the Dark Mode Guideline of Microsoft and we developed the design system to clean up our design. We also decided to unify the components with a sharp corner. Check out the entire design system at the bottom.

A desktop software of multiple screens that work coordinately with each other.

Screen1: Information Center

This interface serves as an information center. Aside from providing dispatchers with easy access to all order information, other necessary information like notification, communication and mission control health are displayed to facilitate dispatchers’ work.

Screen2: Action Center

As the action center for dispatching and monitoring, this interface provides dispatchers with convenient searching and filtering functions to help them locate their targets efficiently. The easy shift between two viewports empowers dispatchers with their needed visualization to suit their works under different scenarios.

Screen3: Remote Assistance Center

Detailed info for selected trucks to empower dispatchers with needed contextual info, to support them make decisions.This interface plays a key role in remote assistance. With detailed indicators of the individual truck, rich contextual info and step-by-step guidance, dispatchers are able to make decisions quickly and effectively.

Key Takeaways

Design future based on now

When we were challenged with designing a future system, I found it difficult to envision how it would be like at the beginning as there are not any existed cases. This is not only a product from 0-1, but more of a new system from 0-1. During the process of user research, the A-ha moment stroke me when I realized that while we were designing future, we were still designing for the same group of people. Shortly, I shifted my mindset from "designing a future system" towards "helping dispatchers better step into future". With this passion, our team kept going back to Daimler team with our design and iterate according to their feedback. While none of us was sure about how future autonomous truck industry would look like, we were together shaping it for better lives.

Multi-screen design: The spatial relationship counts

To cater to dispatchers' context of using multiple screens, we took the challenge of designing a control system across multiple screens. During the process, we experienced a lot of frustration caused by the lack of consistency and cohesion in between different screens when conducting pilot tests. After talking with subject-matter experts, we figured out the importance of considering the screens as a whole. Instead of seeing them as different screens, we considered them each as a part of a wide screen. With this thought, our information on our dashboard started to flow across the system.