Improving road safety through learner driver tools.

Duration of project: 11 months

Business Need

In order to better prepare drivers, the state government introduced a mandatory minimum of 120 hours of driving experience under supervision. In the past, these hours are tracked in a paper log book and learners and supervising drivers currently learn about safety driving through another physical book. This comes at significant operational cost to VicRoads and Transport Accident Commission (TAC) as well as being open to manipulation by learner drivers. MyLearners Mobile Application provides smart tracking of time, date, driving hours and promotes continuous learning through design and technology. Both supervising drivers and learner drivers will be able to save so much time without having to use the physical logbook.

With myLearners, learner drivers will be able to:

• Log and track their hours on the app, no matter where they are.

• Keep track of their progress as they work towards solo driving

• Use the myLearners website to help form lifelong safe driving behaviours.

Supervising drivers will be able to:

• Approve or reject trips

• Provide helpful feedback and comments to learner drivers

• Keep track of all learner drivers in their learner list.

Approach

I led the UI & UX design of the project working very closely with the product strategist and the product owner, collaborating with a large delivery team of 17 in a total of 11 months. Our engagement with VicRoads began with a co-design phase, consisting of user research and interviews with a group of learner drivers and supervising drivers to understand the process of tracking the hours whilst using the physical logbook and also to usability test the app. We also performed an analysis of the technical landscape to help define the solution prior to building the iOS and Android mobile applications.

Targeted messaging

In addition to the mobile application, the myLearners website was developed to provide continuous online learning for the learner drivers. These messages are shown in the app via the “dashboard” and the “start trip” screen. They will be able to link to the specific topic and stages in the website from 14 randomly generated targeted messages in the app which allows them to learn more about safe driving and traffic rules. In order to maintain the consistent look and feel of the app and the website, we had to create illustrations for the 14 targeted messages.