Enter password to view
Kinto One Fleet
Turning fragmented fleet management into a proactive digital workflow
My role
Senior Product Design
Company
Toyota Connected
Year
2021
Background
Kinto One is a flexible car leasing service for businesses. While the service simplified access to vehicles, fleet management remained largely manual - spread across spreadsheets, calendar reminders, disconnected tools and reactive workflows.
The opportunity was to turn fleet management into a proactive, guided experience: helping businesses reduce costs, stay compliant and keep teams moving with less operational burden.
I led design from early discovery through to the launch of Kinto One Online - a web app for fleet managers that surfaced the right information at the right time and guided users through high-impact actions across mileage, maintenance and contract management.
Framing the problem
We began by clarifying business goals, assumptions and customer needs through collaborative workshops with the Kinto team.
Early research showed that Kinto’s customers were often small organisations where fleet management was a secondary responsibility, not a full-time role. Any solution needed to be simple, proactive and low-effort.
I led customer interviews and workflow exploration with prospective fleet managers, focusing on jobs-to-be-done, pain points and how people currently tracked vehicles.
Several consistent themes emerged:
Reactive task management created risk and cost
Fleet managers relied on personal reminders and scattered tools to track key milestones - often missing maintenance, mileage thresholds or contract renewals.
Poor mileage visibility led to unexpected charges
Many only discovered overages when vehicles were returned, creating avoidable cost and frustration.
Maintenance coordination was inefficient
Managers wanted to keep vehicles safe and compliant, but struggled to coordinate bookings and often wanted drivers to manage parts of the process themselves.
Together, these insights pointed to a clear opportunity:
Replace reactive admin with proactive, task-driven fleet management.
Setting the direction
To guide long-term direction, I facilitated a vision workshop with the Kinto team to align around a north star for digital mobility management.
The vision centred on helping companies simplify fleet operations while moving toward more flexible, efficient and sustainable mobility.
Building on research insights, I translated this into outcome-focused hypothesis canvases for key product areas — helping the team evaluate opportunities by customer value, business impact and feasibility.
Exploring the product shape
We brought early hypotheses to life through low-fidelity prototypes and rapid testing with fleet managers.
These sessions helped validate job stories, uncover usability issues and identify “how might we” opportunities that shaped the product direction.
Insights were synthesised into shared artefacts that aligned the cross-functional team and helped move from broad opportunity areas into clearer product workflows.
Moving from opportunities into ideas
With the core opportunity areas defined, we moved into ideation around the highest-leverage workflows.
I explored how fleet visibility, mileage tracking, maintenance coordination and contract management could become clearer, more proactive experiences - using sketches, flows and low-fidelity prototypes to test different product shapes.
This helped the team move from broad problem spaces into tangible ideas we could evaluate, refine and prioritise.
A real-time fleet dashboard
The home experience was designed as a command centre for fleet health. Through multiple rounds of testing, we refined a dashboard that surfaced the most important metrics upfront, highlighted urgent tasks and upcoming actions, and provided quick access to deeper vehicle details.
Making vehicle pages actionable
Each vehicle had a dedicated information page showing real-time status, mileage usage, maintenance history, active tasks and next steps.
A key learning from testing was to surface relevant tasks directly within each vehicle’s page - rather than isolating them in a central task list.
This improved planning and helped managers understand actions in context.
Connecting data and onboarding fleets
To remove friction at setup, we introduced a guided onboarding experience that walked fleet managers through activating telematics data, assigning vehicles to drivers and inviting drivers into the platform.
A major challenge was enabling connected data across multiple vehicles - something previously only available at single-car level.
Working closely with Toyota’s data, legal and engineering teams, I helped define a scalable model that balanced customer usability, data compliance and technical feasibility.
This became foundational infrastructure for the wider product ecosystem.
A task-driven operating model
At the core of the product was a fleet-level task management system centred on mileage usage thresholds, vehicle maintenance milestones and contract renewals.
Tasks were surfaced as due soon, overdue or in progress - allowing fleet managers to prioritise action at a glance.
Multi-stage tasks, such as contract renewals, were given clear progress states to reduce uncertainty and cognitive load.
This brought previously scattered workflows into one streamlined system.
Outcomes
Kinto One Online launched into alpha with a group of fleet managers, generating strong qualitative feedback, clear behavioural improvements and validated workflow efficiencies.
The product was subsequently rolled out more broadly and embedded as a core part of Kinto’s digital offering.
Beyond launch, the work established a foundation for future mobility products by combining proactive task surfaces, real-time connected data and outcome-driven prioritisation.
The result was a guided, task-driven experience that reduced friction for customers and unlocked scale for the business.