100 Americans die on the road every year.

‍

My R&D team at the Dock, Accenture's flagship innovation hub, set out to tackle this growing road safety crisis. We worked directly with state transport departments to understand what exactly was causing this issue.

‍

‍

People need to die before safety interventions are funded.

‍

We discovered that the current reactive approach to safety means it can take months or even years for countermeasures to be implemented, and by then it's just too late. Transport experts are flooded with crash data, but they don't have the tools to correctly identify potential crash hotspots or quickly provide data-backed evidence to secure funding for interventions. Even worse, as we conducted our user interviews it became clear that the different organizations involved were all working on the same problems separately, with conflicting workflows and wasted resources.

How can we make the system more proactive?

‍

There were two key challenges here. The first was finding the right data sources and analysis to accurately predict where fatal crashes were likely to take place, which our Analytics team spearheaded. The second was mapping the interconnected task flows of each stakeholder involved and ultimately re-designing this system to create synergy and efficiency between them. That's where the Design team came in - we spent months interviewing traffic engineers, city planners and state transport authorities to gain these insights.

‍

Creating an AI and Analytics driven toolkit for transport experts

‍

After months of feature mapping, UI development and user flow iterations, we finally developed an extensive working prototype. I acted as the point of contact between Design and Analytics during this process, ensuring that we created an accurate but understandable data visualisation tool. The next step was testing the prototype with the users.

‍

Bumps in the Road.

‍

To be honest, the initial user tests got some mixed reactions. Some stakeholders were concerned that although our solution was certainly a significant improvement to their current task flow, there was not yet enough innovation to warrant an overhaul of their entire system. So, our team went back to the drawing board.

‍

‍

Unlocking the power of LiDAR.

‍

After reviewing our users' feedback, we decided to totally revamp AIM's UI, creating a highly sophisticated yet intuitive data visualisation tool that leveraged advanced filtering, contextual overlays and new technologies like LiDAR and telematics. This allowed us to incorporate game-changing data sources like Near Misses. Near Misses are crashes that almost occurred and provide predictive analytics to transport experts, without any casualties. We call it Insight without Injury.

Accenture Intelligent Mobility (AIM) is now one of the Dock's largest and most successful projects, and was shortlisted for an IDI award. The platform's unique map interface, collaboration tools and prompt-based insights allow transports to quickly identify high-risk zones, record data-backed evidence to prove it and secure intervention funding before any lives are lost.

I scripted, storyboarded and animated the final demo video.
‍

‍