Designing the operator-facing fleet management dashboard for TVS Future Mobility's commercial EV platform, supporting fleet managers across vehicle health, route planning, charging operations, and rider performance in one unified workspace.
Commercial EV adoption was being held back partly by the operations side of the equation. The vehicles existed, the charging infrastructure was scaling, and the unit economics were starting to work for the right use cases. What was not solved was how fleet operators actually ran their business day to day once they owned a small fleet of commercial EVs.
The operators we interviewed were using one tool for vehicle telematics, another for rider rosters, a third for charging schedules, a fourth for maintenance logging, and a spreadsheet (always a spreadsheet) for everything in between. Decisions about which routes to run on which vehicles were being made on gut feel because no single view existed of the operationally-relevant variables together. Fleet managers were spending their morning aggregating data from disparate systems before they could even start making decisions, which made the operational overhead of running an EV fleet meaningfully higher than running a comparable diesel fleet.
TVS had the opportunity to bring these workflows into a unified workspace, but the design risk was real. Every consolidation attempt in this category had historically ended up as a feature parade rather than a coherent tool. Vendors had tried before and produced kitchen-sink dashboards that were technically comprehensive and practically unusable. The brief I took on was to build a workspace that fleet operators would actually choose to use, not one that they were forced to use by procurement.
B2B design lives or dies on field research, and this project required spending serious time with fleet operators. I shadowed fleet managers at small and mid-sized operators across multiple cities, watching how they ran their morning briefings, how they handled mid-day disruptions, and how they reviewed end-of-day performance. The research took six weeks of fieldwork before the design phase even started.
The pattern that emerged across operators was that fleet management is fundamentally a question-answering job, not a data-monitoring job. Through the day, the fleet manager is repeatedly answering the same handful of questions: which vehicles are ready for tomorrow's routes, which riders need attention, which charging slots are at capacity, which maintenance issues are escalating. Their existing tools forced them to navigate through data to assemble answers themselves. The opportunity was to design a workspace where the answers were the primary surface and the underlying data was available for drill-down when needed.
The research also surfaced a critical role distinction. Fleet operators are not a uniform role. A small fleet owner does everything themselves. A large fleet has dispatchers, mechanics, finance teams, and operations managers who each use different parts of the system. The dashboard had to handle both ends of this spectrum without becoming two different products, which became the central design challenge.
Rather than starting from what data we had, I started from the questions fleet operators actually ask through a day. The dashboard was organised around those questions, with each surface being an answer rather than a chart. This was a deliberate inversion of the dashboard convention of showing all available metrics and trusting the user to derive answers.
The home view was a question-first layout that surfaced the operator's most-needed answers for that moment in their day. Each answer card was clickable to a deeper view with the underlying data and the ability to take operational actions directly from that view. The card itself was the answer; the deeper view was the supporting evidence and the action layer.
Role awareness was built into the workspace from the start. A small fleet owner sees a different default set of cards than a dispatcher at a larger fleet. The cards are not different products, they are different defaults from the same product. The role awareness can be adjusted per user, so a dispatcher who occasionally needs the finance view can pin it without leaving their role-default workspace.
The information density had to match B2B expectations. Consumer products lean toward whitespace and visual breathing room. B2B operations users tolerate and reward density when it serves their workflow, because they are in the product for long sessions and value the ability to take in a lot of information at once. The design used denser layouts than I would have used in a consumer context, but with careful typographic hierarchy to keep the density readable.
Cards as answers, drill-downs as evidence. The standard B2B dashboard pattern is to show charts and trust the user to interpret them into operationally-useful answers. We inverted this: cards present an answer (vehicles ready for tomorrow: 23 of 24, with 1 blocked on a brake pad replacement), and the underlying chart sits one click away. This was a more opinionated design choice than dashboards usually make, and it required us to be confident in our understanding of what operators actually needed answered.
Role awareness via defaults, not gating. The risk with role awareness is creating a product that feels different to different users in confusing ways. We addressed this by treating roles as default configurations rather than feature gates. Every user can access every card, but their default workspace is configured for their role. This kept the product feeling unified while serving different roles appropriately.
Density that respects the operational user. B2B operations users do not want consumer-style whitespace. They want information density that respects their time and their fluency with the data. The visual design used tight spacing, smaller type sizes, and denser data presentation than a consumer product would tolerate, calibrated through testing with actual operators rather than designer intuition.
Action layer integrated into views. Many B2B dashboards force users to read the data in one place and take action in another, which produces context-switching cost. We integrated the action layer into the data views, so an operator looking at the vehicles-ready card could initiate a maintenance dispatch directly from that card without navigating away. This was a significant engineering investment that paid back in operator efficiency.
Question-first information design
Pilot fleets that previously used multiple tools consolidated their workflow into the TVS dashboard during the pilot period, which was the primary outcome the project had been scoped to produce. Without quoting specific time-savings numbers, the qualitative shift was the most telling: operators started referring to the dashboard as a place they go to think about their fleet, not just to react to alerts.
That shift from reactive to proactive use is the hardest one to design for in operations tools, and getting it on the first attempt was a meaningful win for the team. Reactive use means the tool only matters when something is wrong. Proactive use means the tool becomes part of how the operator runs their business, which is the position that produces long-term retention and advocacy.
The information design patterns developed in this project also informed adjacent TVS Future Mobility products, particularly the rider-facing app where consistent treatment of vehicle health, range, and trip data created a shared mental model across operator and rider surfaces.
B2B operations design requires sitting with operators for hours, watching them work, asking dumb questions, and understanding the operational seams that designers rarely see from outside. The discipline pays off because B2B users tolerate ugly but reward fitness for purpose. Get the workflow right and visual polish is a bonus. Get the workflow wrong and no amount of visual polish saves the product.
I came away from this project with a much sharper appreciation for how different B2B and B2C design actually are, despite using the same toolset on the surface. The instincts that serve a consumer-product designer (whitespace, progressive disclosure, delight moments) can actively work against a B2B operations user, and unlearning some of those instincts was the most useful thing the project taught me.