FleetPulse — compliance for Indian commercial fleets
Category
UX Design · Product Design · Mobile App
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The goal was to help large fleet managers have a ease of aceess to manage the papaerwork for every single work in their fleet
An Indian commercial vehicle carries a stack of documents that expire on independent dates — RC, insurance, PUC, fitness certificate, national and state permits, road tax, the AIS-140 tracking certificate, plus the driver's licence. Multiply that by sixty vehicles and a fleet manager is tracking several hundred separate expiry dates, mostly on paper.
Miss one and the vehicle is fined or grounded at a checkpost, often hundreds of kilometres from the office, with a driver who has no idea which document is the problem.
FleetPulse is a concept mobile app built around that specific failure. Compliance is also what's forcing digital adoption in this market — AIS-140 mandates and the National Logistics Policy have turned fleet software from an optimisation purchase into a compulsory one — while the big platforms still lead with GPS and fuel analytics. The paperwork is the underserved part.
The first version was a dashboard. Four tabs — Fleet, Tasks, Compliance, Analytics — each a well-built screen. Then I audited my own compliance screen properly and found the information was all present and the layout was answering the wrong question.
Documents were listed independently and ordered alphabetically, which meant an insurance policy with 133 days of runway sat above a permit expiring in twelve. Each document had a circular progress ring showing percentage of validity elapsed — so a one-year document and a five-year document produced wildly different percentages for identical real-world risk. 36% looked more alarming than 3%, but twelve days was the emergency. And nothing rolled up: there was no screen anywhere that answered whether a particular vehicle was legal to operate.
The closest solved problem isn't fleet software. It's SSL certificate monitoring — a list of things that silently expire on independent dates, where the established pattern is days-remaining with urgency-based colour coding rather than proportions. Compliance tools converge on the same answer: bucket by time window, highlight seven days differently from thirty or ninety, and sort by urgency so the most critical item is always at the top.
What changed. The list now ranks vehicles by how soon each becomes illegal. Percentages are gone; every document shows days remaining. Each card carries the consequence in plain language — "Illegal to operate. Fine up to ₹10,000 if stopped," "Renewal takes 7–10 working days" — because the manager's question isn't what the status is but how long they have and what happens if they ignore it. The twenty-one healthy vehicles collapse into a single green line instead of twenty-one rows.
The part I'm most attached to is the driver. Every screen in the first version was office-side, but the person who actually gets stopped is the driver. Checkpost mode is a dark, offline-capable screen with a single ROAD LEGAL verdict, the registration number set large enough for an officer to read at arm's length, and a QR to verify against VAHAN. Same data, different user, entirely different design brief.
The lesson here wasn't visual. My first version had every piece of information a manager needs and still failed, because it was organised around the data model — vehicles contain documents — rather than around the decision the person is making. Rearranging the same data fixed more than any new feature would have.
What I'd do differently: validate the four-tier urgency split with actual fleet managers rather than reasoning it out, and test Checkpost mode in the situation it's designed for, which is dim light, time pressure, and someone in uniform waiting. I'd also design the document capture flow, since photographing a certificate and auto-extracting its expiry date is where the real time saving lives.
Self-initiated concept, built in Figma. No client — which meant the only critic was me, and the most useful thing I did on this project was audit my own work as if someone else had made it.
