Zone management revamp

Dott, e-bikes and e-scooters sharing service

How a new zone uploader freed up 40+ hours per city and unlocked 200+ new markets.

2024

Summary

Details of this project could be shown on request

Problem

Dott zone uploader interface

Adding geofence and zones to a new city is a huge pain: they’re plenty, they’re small, very detailed and an absolute nightmare to do by hand. The only “technical solution” was to use an engineer to help upload the zones via backend, which is pretty expensive thus we wanted to avoid that.

As a city manager, when I have received a new set of zones to add for my market, I want to be able to add the exact shapes directly in Portal, so that I don’t have to redraw them manually or depend on an engineer to do it.

Solution

I brought a bunch of explorations to the team and just after one hour left with a much better ideas than I could come up with by myself. The engineers made some of my “extra” ideas real. The solution was the zone uploader that not only lets user upload the file or copy-paste JSON, but also:

  • downloads the backup,
  • does all the zone checks,
  • explains what needs to be fixed, and
  • gives and overview of the uploaded zones to make sure everything is correct.
Now all that takes about 30 seconds to migrate a new city, as opposed to hours of manual work.

Challenges and limitaitons

We had to break it down into 4 versions and limit the number of zones that could be uploaded at once. Also, some checks needed to be put in place for irreversible changes.

Outcome

Zone uploader saved us about 40 hours of manual work per city. In 2024 Dott merged with Tier and had to integrate 200+ new markets onto our platform and that would have been bare possible without this tool. If we estimate the average rate of €28/h, that is €224,000+ for the company.

Moreover, this functionality was extended to enable other types of zones: shift zones for the drivers, compliance zones that temporarily restrict riders in the city, analytical zones for internal use and so on.

Reflections

Overall, this is one of the best collaborations I’ve ever had with the product and engineers. I’ve found out that high level designs are the most efficient way to get early feedback and to move fast. By showing early work I got lots of clarity and could continue to design a very solid solution that ended up being immensely useful.