Interaction & visual design for Geofencing feature on Esper Platform ( Case study)

Overview

At Esper, we provide an Android device and app management platform for enterprise users to manage their fleet of devices.

Geofence feature gives our users control over their device. It also helps them to track & lock devices if the device is moved out of perimeter they defined.

Customers/ Users

For your context, our users in almost every industry where they use android devices for their digital business. Be it a retail, Hospitality, eCommerce, healthcare, transportation.

They use android devices, for their daily activities be it a kiosk device, digital signage, or basic mobile devices for their employees. Some examples of our customers are Bigbasket, Uber, Care.ai, Spire health, Intelity, Ordermark, and many more.

Roles & Responsibities

Me : Design & strategy

Problem Statement

As per our Iteration 1 geofence design, we had some restrictions while creating the geofence which needed little better experience & control for the end-users. Some of issues our users faced:

Once the geo fence is created, users cannot add more devices to the same geofence.

Once the geofence is created they cannot edit, its perimeter or actions chosen.

With Iteration 1 actions include, locking the device & Beep on the device. On the console side, there is no notification that the device has moved out of geofence until the user goes to particular geofence & checks.

Email notification is needed by the user.

Delete geofence

Usabltiy issues ( needs revamp)

Visual design to be more appealing.

Process

The one key idea while designing the feature was to keep in mind was that interface should be self explanatory & it should lead the users towards the competition with simple sequence

The three primary Sequences to follow:

Defining geofence: users should be able to set the pin location, set the perimeter for geofence & give it a recognition ( name).

The second step in sequence lets them decide on which set of devices users want to apply the geofence and add those devices to geofence. Also, we made sure there is clear visibility into the process where they can clearly see which device they have added in the sperate section if in case they want to remove some devices, they don't have to navigate back to different pages. The idea was clear visual cues.

The final step was to define the action they want to take on the device when it goes out of the Geofence area. With this design, we gave basic two actions where the device could go into lockdown mode or also make a beep sound to get identified on spot. Also, we provided an email & push notification features, so the right persons get notified. The key challenge we had in Lockdown action was how could we make a device lock if it is not connected to the cloud . So we made this small intelligence to sit on the device directly. On the basis of GPS location coordinates, the device was able to lockdown itself even if it is not connected to the internet.

Interaction & visual Designs

Geofence Empty state

Geofence New geofence / Set geofence

Geofence New geofence / Add devices

Geofence New geofence / Set Actions & Notifications

List view of geofences

List view Geofence / more actions

Geofence activity feed

Geofence activity feed / more details

View geofence inside view

Geoofence Device timeline

Delete Geofence/activity feed

Geofence deleted state in geofence is view

Prototype video Link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19k29PU9eKCEYfbPycj7mdGVrpw2-8xyY/view?usp=sharing

Outcomes and lessons learned

The basic version of design went well, and few customers are using it heavily as it suits their use case and s working well for them as they wanted to make sure their devices should not move out of geofence perimeter.

However, we did not find some of the customers adapting to it, as we considered only certain use cases while designing it.

Next action: We are currently having sessions with our other customers & listing their use cases and making sure we could cover most of them & then ideate how we could bring their use cases int the product.