Challenge 

When Element Financial Corp acquired GE Capital Fleet Services, drivers were left navigating a fragmented toolset — a rebranded but structurally unchanged legacy app, and a separate mileage-tracking product, Clarus Driver, built on an entirely different interaction model. Day-to-day, drivers were losing time hunting for in-network fuel and service locations, and navigating two incompatible systems for something as basic as logging a trip.

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Approach

• Feedback on driver pain points had previously come in unsystematically — informal comments relayed through customer service reps, product managers, and others who interacted with drivers, typically vague and hard to act on ("it works fine," "sometimes I have a problem").

• Proposed and led a more structured alternative: a day-in-the-life task inventory that walked drivers through their actual day rather than asking them to describe problems directly, designed to surface concrete detail and reinforce patterns across multiple drivers rather than relying on isolated, secondhand reports.

• Designed and ran the study across 7 company-vehicle drivers (non-truck fleet), tracked in a self-built Trello board mapping daily activity (Before Work, Morning, Afternoon, After Work, During the Day, Weekends) against task type (Travel, Communication, Pain Points, Administrative, Business, Personal).

• Findings identified a specific, disproportionate burden: locating in-network fuel and service without stopping to search separately. Research findings aligned with retaining automatic trip capture — already present in the legacy product — while directing design focus toward a map-based fuel and service locator tied to the driver's fleet card, and toward resolving the inherited mileage-tracking split into a single reporting pattern.​

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Outcomes

• Xcelerate for Drivers launched in late July 2016 as Element's flagship driver mobile app, with fuel/service location and mileage reporting — the two areas this research informed — positioned as the product's core value proposition

• The service-location pattern was extended in August 2017 with bookable maintenance and windshield-repair appointments through Firestone Complete Auto Care, Tires Plus, and Safelite AutoGlass, building directly on the same design approach

• Shipped as the resolution to two structurally incompatible mileage-tracking systems inherited from the acquisition, unifying drivers onto a single reporting pattern

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​Growth Opportunity

Trip classification remained a manual, repetitive task even after automatic capture solved the logging problem — drivers still had to tap through each trip to mark it Business or Personal. Smarter default classification, inferred from patterns like time of day, frequency, or saved locations, could reduce that remaining friction and get closer to a fully passive reporting experience.