Organization
General Motors
Client
Utah Department of Transportation
Challenge
Transportation agencies relied on outdated crash reports, fragmented tools, and manual workflows to make high-stakes decisions.
Users we designed for
Future Roads needed to support multiple audiences with different goals and levels of technical expertise.
Safety Analysts
Deep analysis, trend identification, and corridor-level insights
Engineers + Planners
Project prioritization and infrastructure decision-making
Leadership
Clear summaries and decision-ready insights
Operations Teams
Quick visibility into emerging risks
The challenge was designing one platform that felt powerful for experts while remaining intuitive for everyday users.
Design approach
1. Start With Geography
Road safety decisions are inherently spatial, so the map became the foundation of the experience. Users could immediately understand where issues were happening before diving into deeper analysis. This reduced cognitive load and grounded the experience in real-world context.
2. Turn Data Into Decisions
Rather than presenting raw datasets, I designed dashboards that surfaced the most important signals first:
risk score
crash counts
severity trends
speed behavior
historical changes
This allowed users to quickly assess conditions without needing to interpret complex data structures.
3. Make Complexity Manageable
The platform included many variables. To keep it usable, I designed progressive filtering and layered controls.
Users could narrow analysis by:
geography
time range
roadway type
behavior patterns
severity levels
supporting datasets
Advanced capabilities were available without overwhelming less technical users.
4. Design for Exploration
Users didn’t follow a linear workflow—they explored.
The interface supported movement between:
map views
tables
trend analysis
corridor comparisons
detailed metric breakdowns
reporting outputs
This made the product feel like a working tool rather than a static dashboard.
Outcome
Future Roads later launched publicly as Safety View by GM Future Roads & INRIX, a nationwide, cloud-based safety analytics platform for transportation agencies.
The platform combined connected vehicle, crash, and contextual data to help agencies:
identify hazardous road segments
prioritize safety investments
evaluate Vision Zero initiatives
support funding and grant applications
make faster, data-informed decisions
What began as an exploratory concept evolved into a real-world product designed to improve roadway safety at scale.