DrivePal

Target Audience: Lorry companies and drivers

DrivePal is an app that allows lorry drivers to sit back and relax when doing a long haul.

Graphic Design, UX/UI, Figma, Adobe Software

MINDMAPPING

To begin this project we, as a class, created a Miro board where we wrote down things that concerned us, were an advantage or what we liked etc and separated them into groups to allow us to get an better understanding of what others thought of autonomous vehicles as well as ideas of where we wanted to take the project.

PROCESS

My idea was one that I wasn’t too sure whether I could get away with as it wasn’t fully autonomous. The idea struck me when I was speaking to my boyfriends dad, who is a lorry driver. The idea of the drivers being able to switch to AV mode even on their breaks to get to their destination in time without stops. When speaking with my boyfriends dad about his day previous, he explained he didn't make it back from his shift on time therefore he had to sleep in his lorry for the rest of the night even though he was 15 mins away from the house. That's when it hit me, why don’t lorries have an AV system installed so drivers can get back to their families each night and not have to worry.

In class we completed an exercise where we created user stories to gauge a better understanding of who we are trying to target.

I am a lorry driver.

I’m trying to do my job safely.

But I can only drive for a certain amount of hours legally.

Because it would be unsafe otherwise.

Which makes me feel anxious in case I can’t get back to my family in time and would have to sleep in my lorry.

To further understand who I am targeting, I created two user stories of the lorry driver and the man who owns the lorry company. To create these personas, I used ChatGPT as this allowed for a really in depth reach of user perspective. The persona, I entered the prompt scenario which was a lorry driver I know was in, and the output was scary similar to what his situation is.

DEVELOPMENT

A sitemap was the best way to visualise what screens were needed as it allowed me to branch off further and further until I had a tree full of screens. This did give scope to pick and choose which screens were more important and which ones I could eliminate.

DASHBOARD SKETCHES

Now that I had decided what screens I was going to do, I began to sketch out what these could look like. I kept these quick as I only wanted to try out some layouts and make sure these screens worked they the I wated them to. I focused mainly on the homepage as this is what the user will be seeing majority of the time.

WIREFRAME SKETCHES

With a structure for each screen, I sketched out the screens in more detail and fixed them slightly so they all looked cohesive. I went with a tiled structure as once I made each tile, it would be easier to use them through each screen as I knew they would all match.

I then brought it into Figma once I was happy with it and developed from there. As this was a bigger project, it took some time to get my head around the prototyping section as it got confusing, however I powered through and got it to where it is now.

REFLECTION

Looking back over this project, in the beginning I was not looking forward to making it as I have no real interest in cars however it challenged me in more ways than one. I ended up really enjoying it and researching int how autonomous vehicles work. If i was given more time, I would create a mobile app that go along with it where the user can log their journeys and look back on previous travels for example. Overall, I think this was a good project and shows that even if there is a project I am not interested in, just simply trying it out can lead to great things.