Route One GO

Background

After successfully launching Route One ELD, we identified another major challenge faced by drivers every day.

Most navigation applications were built for passenger vehicles, not commercial trucks.

Drivers regularly encountered routes that ignored vehicle dimensions, weight restrictions, hazmat regulations, bridge clearances, and truck-specific road limitations. As a result, navigation became one of the most common operational pain points within the industry.

RouteOne GO was created to address these challenges and provide a navigation experience specifically designed for professional truck drivers.

Unlike traditional navigation products, the goal was not simply to guide drivers from point A to point B. The objective was to support the entire driving experience and help drivers make better operational decisions throughout their day.

The challenge

Building truck navigation is significantly more complex than building traditional navigation software.

The product needed to consider:

• Vehicle dimensions
• Weight restrictions
• Hazmat regulations
• Truck-specific road restrictions
• Fuel planning
• Parking availability
• Rest stops and truck services
• Weigh stations
• Driver workflows
• Integration with fleet operations

Every routing decision could have operational, financial, compliance, or safety implications.

The challenge was helping drivers navigate safely, legally, and efficiently while reducing friction throughout their daily operations.

My role

As Project & Product Lead, I was responsible for driving the product from concept to implementation.

My responsibilities included:

• Product vision and strategy
• Roadmap planning
• Discovery and user research
• Stakeholder interviews
• Feature prioritization
• UX and interaction design
• Sprint planning and delivery coordination
• Product validation and iteration

I worked closely with developers, designers, QA engineers, analysts, and business stakeholders to ensure alignment between technical capabilities, business objectives, and driver needs.

A significant part of the work focused on understanding real-world driver workflows and translating them into intuitive product experiences.

Discovery and user research

One advantage of RouteOne GO was our existing access to drivers through the RouteOne ecosystem.

Years of working on ELD products provided direct exposure to driver behavior, inspections, compliance requirements, operational challenges, and everyday navigation problems.

However, one of the biggest challenges was gathering meaningful feedback.

Truck drivers are busy professionals. Most spend their days driving, managing deliveries, handling inspections, and dealing with operational issues. Product interviews are rarely a priority.

Many drivers initially did not fully understand what we were building or why certain questions mattered.

Building trust and collecting useful insights required months of continuous conversations, support interactions, interviews, field observations, and validation sessions.

Over time, a much deeper picture emerged.

Navigation was only one small part of the driver’s daily reality.

To create a truly useful product, we needed to understand how drivers lived, worked, rested, planned routes, handled paperwork, and solved everyday problems on the road.

Competitive research

Before defining the product roadmap, we conducted extensive research into existing trucking navigation solutions used across North America.

Particular attention was given to Trucker Path and KeepTruckin (now Motive), which served as important benchmarks throughout the project.

The objective was not to replicate existing products but to understand:

• How drivers planned routes
• How parking and rest-stop information was presented
• Common navigation workflows
• Strengths and weaknesses of existing solutions
• Opportunities for differentiation

This research helped establish usability benchmarks and provided valuable insight into driver expectations, allowing us to prioritize features with proven operational value while avoiding many of the shortcomings present in competing products.

Understanding driver reality

One of the most important discoveries was that drivers were searching for much more than routes.

As research progressed, we identified a wide range of destinations and services that played an important role in everyday operations:

• Truck parking locations
• Truck stops
• Rest areas
• CAT Scale locations
• Weigh stations
• Fuel stops
• Pharmacies
• Medical services
• Repair facilities
• Food locations
• Printing and document services
• Fitness centers and gyms

Some discoveries were unexpected.

For example, many drivers preferred visiting specific gym chains because they could take a shower, exercise, and access additional facilities for nearly the same cost as a truck stop shower.

Printing services remained surprisingly important because drivers frequently needed to handle permits, documents, contracts, and operational paperwork while on the road.

These findings significantly influenced our Points of Interest strategy.

The goal was not simply to display locations on a map.

The goal was to help drivers make better decisions throughout their entire journey.

The platform eventually included information about truck-specific locations, CAT Scale facilities, weigh stations, and operational services that were directly relevant to professional drivers.

Real-world validation

Unlike many navigation products that are primarily tested in office environments, RouteOne GO required validation under real operating conditions.

To better understand driver behavior, navigation challenges, GPS reliability, and route accuracy, we conducted extensive field testing using our own vehicles.

Over the course of development, we covered more than 1,200 miles while testing navigation scenarios, route calculations, truck-specific restrictions, and operational workflows.

Engineers and product team members monitored application behavior in real time, reviewing logs, reproducing edge cases, and debugging issues as they occurred during actual trips.

The testing process extended far beyond route validation.

Areas tested included:

• Route guidance accuracy
• GPS performance
• Font readability
• Map readability at different zoom levels
• Speed-based interface behavior
• Day and night visibility
• Battery consumption
• Offline scenarios
• Poor connectivity environments
• Edge-case routing situations

In several cases, features that appeared to work perfectly in office environments revealed significant usability or performance problems when tested at highway speeds.

These insights led to numerous improvements in map scaling, typography, information hierarchy, route presentation, and overall usability.

The experience reinforced an important lesson:

Truck navigation cannot be fully validated from a desk. It must be tested in the same environment where drivers rely on it every day.

Product design

The goal was to create a navigation platform that felt familiar enough for immediate adoption while providing trucking-specific functionality.

The product included:

• Truck-specific route optimization
• Vehicle profile management
• Hazmat routing support
• Fuel cost visibility
• Truck-focused Points of Interest
• Parking and rest-stop discovery
• CAT Scale locations
• Weigh station visibility
• Real-time route guidance
• Driver-focused workflows

Particular attention was paid to reducing cognitive load and minimizing distractions while driving.

Navigation products are unique because poor UX decisions can directly impact safety.

Every interaction was evaluated through the lens of driver safety, usability, and operational efficiency.

Several design decisions were informed by patterns observed in leading trucking products such as Trucker Path and KeepTruckin while adapting those concepts to RouteOne GO’s broader ecosystem and driver workflows.

Product strategy

Rather than attempting to compete directly with every navigation provider, the strategy focused on solving problems specific to trucking operations.

The objective was to create a product that integrated naturally into the driver’s daily workflow while complementing RouteOne’s broader ecosystem.

This approach allowed the product to address operational challenges beyond navigation alone and become part of a larger fleet management ecosystem.

Cross-functional leadership

The project required close collaboration across multiple disciplines.

I coordinated communication between:

• Engineering
• Design
• QA
• Product stakeholders
• Fleet operators
• Drivers

Features were prioritized based on customer value, business impact, technical feasibility, and operational importance.

Product metrics, customer feedback, and usage patterns continuously informed roadmap decisions and future iterations.

Outcome

RouteOne GO evolved into a truck-focused navigation platform designed to help drivers navigate more efficiently, reduce operational friction, lower fuel costs, and improve everyday decision-making on the road.

More importantly, the project demonstrated that successful transportation products require much more than maps and routing algorithms.

They require a deep understanding of how drivers actually work, where they spend their time, the constraints they face, and the countless operational decisions they make every day.

Building RouteOne GO became another important step in a broader journey of designing products for transportation, fleet operations, and regulated industries where operational efficiency, compliance, and user safety are equally important.