Samsara Safety Event Triage
Role: Lead Product Designer
Most Samsara users rely on their vehicle’s in-cab camera to identify if their drivers doing unsafe behaviors. In early 2021, we introduced new behavior detections such as mobile phone usage and tailgating, which greatly increased the number of events that our customers received in our Safety Inbox. We started to get feedback that the number of events was overwhelming, particularly for our enterprise customers.
The Problem
From research, I discovered that when customers described having a high event volume, they were describing the amount of time it took to go through all of their fleet’s event videos and determining which drivers were most in need of coaching, also known as event triage.
Along with my PM and EM, I proposed a number of solutions across the platform. My team focused on improving the triage experience in the Safety Inbox to keep a focused road map.
Uncovering Insights
In our Safety Inbox, managers go through each event video that drivers generate. The process was slow, taking a safety manager up to an hour a day to accomplish.
Bulk edit controls
From customer conversations and looking at data analytics, I saw that our user’s primary actions were to dismiss easily determinable false positives early (40% of triage actions) and then dive in to the event page level for the events that need a greater attention to detail. Being able to bulk dismiss and edit status was a key missing feature.
Better Prioritization
Users were also often filtering down to the most severe behaviors first so they could tackle behaviors with the most urgent need for intervention. I added enhanced filtering, including for high severity events and the top behaviors, so customers could see those events more efficiently. I also added event counts so customers could watch the number go down and feel like they were making progress in their workflow.
Inline editing & detailed video preview
Providing both camera views and a map in a preview window gave customers context around the event. This helped them determine if an event is a true event and coachable. It also allowed customers to see who the driver was so they can easily identify the them and assign the driver to the event. Additionally, I added the ability to edit individual details like event type or coach at the top level to provide efficiency gains over having to click in to the event to edit.
The results
30%
of events updated via bulk actions
266k
clicks saved