Project Overview

Product: DSI trucking app and MSI medical app
Company: Atmos Apps
Industry: Mobile apps
Role: UX Designer
Timeframe: 1 Month
Platform: iphone and android

Designing a financial tool to help Truckers

This was an interesting project to be involved in. The company DSI owns a fleet of Semis that transport goods across the U.S. and they wanted to develop a tool to help the truckers keep track of their mileage and receipts for their expenses to aid them in keeping track of their financial information for tax purposes. Traditionally truckers have a very analog and unconventional way of keeping track of this kind of information, they would use a brown paper bag and keep their receipts in it and often not do a good job of saving them all and would use a paper notepad to keep track of their mileage log. Both not very reliable methods of keeping track of financial information for independent contractors.

Background & User Needs

DSI is a traditional US trucking carrier “with innovative technologies” across dry van, temperature‑controlled, and shuttle services , they needed an app that must:

Enable FMCSA‑compliant hours‑of‑service logging
Replace paper logs with automated electronic logging
Deliver dispatch updates, live location, and stop statuses
Allow drivers to upload proof of delivery—photos & signatures
DOT compliance
Automatic status changes, alerts, dispatch details
GPS background mode
And photo attachment

UX Design stage 1: Research

I was able to sit with the product owner and the client and do a video call to review the projects requirements. We did a 2 hour call and whiteboard brainstormed on what the goals of the product needed to be. We then had weekly reviews with the client to go over our design process and confirm we were working in the right direction.

Requirements gathering - Finding out what we need to design

Defining User Personas

This was primarily defined in the initial call with the client. Fortunately it was a fairly straightforward thing to define.

Defining Use Cases

We were able to break the use cases into three primary groups. 1. new customers 2. Existing Clients and 3.Truckers that need to file their quarterly taxes. We did this through a audio call design session with the client and white boarded all the notes.

UX Design stage 3: Wireframing

Low Fidelity Exploration

We moved to low fidelity prototyping after we felt we had a solid idea of the flow and the general design. Once we fleshed out this project I handed the final visual design over to a different designer so I could move to the next project.

UX Design stage 4: Implementation

In this particular instance the company had a ui artist that worked on the final comps of the design and they were handed off to the developers so implement the design.