Overview
Zonar, a leading enterprise fleet management company, faced a major challenge: its products and services needed architectural and experience-layer updates to unify them into a single, competitive platform.
Years of technical debt and design neglect had left the system fragile, and the user experience for Zonar’s customer-facing portal, Ground Traffic Control (GTC), was outdated compared to newer competitors. Frustrated customers struggled with clunky tools, often resorting to exporting raw data and building their own spreadsheets just to extract meaningful insights about their fleets. On top of that, Zonar serves a diverse range of customers across multiple industries—freight, vocational, and passenger transport—each with unique needs. The big question: how can we create a balanced user experience that works for all of them?
To truly serve its users, Zonar needed a smarter approach—one that delivered data-driven insights in a way that helped customers quickly understand what part of their fleet needed attention.
My Role: Head of Design
Contributions:
Product Design Management
Design Team Leadership
User Research
User Experience Design
User Interface Design
QualityAssurance
Project Length: 3 years
Design Team: ~9 people - Amanda Parkhurst, Rich Robinson, Kat Craig, Kayla Heard-Rising, Sean O’Brien, Katy Harrison, Troy Yung, Patty Namsapanan
“How can we transform our current platform’s offerings so they are competitive against emerging market entrants?”
In production
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However….
The fleet management industry was rapidly evolving, with OEMs tightening control over vehicle data, AI reshaping operations, and fleets demanding smarter, higher-ROI solutions. As competition intensified and base services became commoditized, Zonar’s legacy SaaS offering and new platform solution faced new constraints.
To stay ahead, Zonar needed to offer flexible data solutions, predictive analytics, and task automation. To better understand what this would look like, Zonar explored an AI-first strategy to create an AI-assisted decision-making layer across data gathered from its telematics units, tablets, and smart cameras.
“What would it look like if AI was a core part of our platform’s offering?”
An “AI First” re-envisioned experience
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High Fidelity AI “Copilot” Comps
The questions above led us to rethink the desktop experience that is comped below. The focus for agentic AI follows both HAX Copilot concepts as well alerting through social media channels like we see in Tableau Pulse.
Home Page Dashboard with embedded metrics and Assistive AI
Use Case: Triage home page with “Z-Pilot” button on upper right hand side to access assistant.
Home Page (Cont.) with embedded metrics with assistive AI open
Mobile alert with metrics analysis and AI agent for further exploration
Use Case: User gets alerted to trend in driver behavior via mobile. They could use assistive AI to further analyze the situation….
…or go to desktop Posted Speed report with embedded AI (analysis highlights in modules) and “Z-Pilot” button with tabular data to explore the trend analysis more deeply….
…and then could go to immersive AI “Z-Pilot” experience in the historical tabular data view to further interrogate the data.
Query results with AI guidance, tabular data pushed down but still accessible
