Zonar Systems // Posted Speed Report

Using UX research to put product roadmaps on the right path

A US highway with prominent speed limit signs. — A typical US highway with prominent speed limit signs.

“People ignore products that ignore people.”

— Frank Chimero, head of brand at Modern Treasury

The problem

In late 2024, Zonar was completely revamping our flagship software platform, Ground Traffic Control (GTC). After years of technical debt and design being deprioritized, GTC had become brittle, slow, and the user experience felt outdated, especially when compared to competitors. Frustrated customers were often forced to export raw data and build their own spreadsheets just to get meaningful insights about their fleets.

There was a great deal of pressure to release an updated version of our Posted Speed report as quickly as possible, pressure that forced us to skip a chance to conduct research. The timeline also necessitated cutting features from the new version that were important to the existing report, namely associating a driver with a speeding event and determining the severity of events.

My solution

While we hadn’t allowed time for comprehensive user research and testing in our timeline, I found it necessary to do at least some research to validate the assumptions that executive leadership had made.

First, I needed to confirm whether or not having a driver associated with a speeding event was important to our users. It had assumed to be important because drivers speed, not vehicles, and safety managers need to associate speeding events to drivers for coaching or disciplinary action. But I needed hard data to back that up if we were to change a roadmap.

Second, I wanted to better understand the types of speeding users were hoping to find in the report. People speed all the time, for all sorts of reasons. Safety managers need ways to differentiate minor speeding events (like passing) from more serious and persistent speeding patterns indicating potential safety risks.

My Contribution

UX strategy
Product vision
Cross-functional collaboration
Research participant recruitment
Discussion guide authoring
Usability testing
Data analysis
Stakeholder management
Product roadmap management

Desk research

The first thing I did was turn to our internal site analytics to measure how often the existing Posted Speed report was accessed by customers who did and did not have driver association.

I found that customers who did not have drivers associated to speeding events did not use the Posted Speed report. Customers who did have drivers associated were much more likely to use the report, and much more often.

This led me to believe that driver association was an extremely valuable feature to include in the new version of the Posted Speed report.

Discussion guide

I worked with the Product Designer on my team, Patty Namsapanan, to develop an interview discussion guide to test our hypotheses and ensure we were committing to building the right product for our users.

Prototype

User Testing

Analysis

Proposing a strategic pivot

Next, we needed to do was determine how the report would define a speeding event. Product leadership had originally decided to only include one type of speeding event—critical speeding events—in the report. However, our research had shown this would paint an incomplete picture of a driver’s safety record, and make the report less valuable.

I needed to make a case for adding enough scope to the project to include this valuable feature, without so much scope as to completely derail the timeline.

Results

Ultimately, I was able to convince Executive Leadership team to adjust the product roadmaps to account for the features our research showed were necessary.

Research-validated, value based features like these contributed in large part to a 57% increase in adoption of Zonar’s next-gen platform, and a 35% increase in NPS year-over-year.

Learn more about how I work with these other case studies.

Zonar - UX Research