Putting live traffic data where drivers need it

01 / THE OPPORTUNITY

Show drivers what Waze does best and give them a reason to try it.

Our awareness data showed that people knew Waze best for its real-time traffic information. Drivers who didn’t use the app had no way to see how that information could help them on the road. Marketing leadership imagined a news-ticker-inspired widget that could bring live route information to out-of-home screens and show non-users the power of Waze. I joined to help define what that could look like in the real world.

03 / FINDING THE RIGHT PLACE

Found a billboard where live traffic could guide a choice.

I helped source an internet-connected billboard in Houston, one of our priority markets at the time. It sat about a mile ahead of a key choice between two major commuter routes into downtown. Both roads would get drivers there, but travel times could vary greatly with traffic. The placement mattered because the idea needed to show real-time information at a moment when it could help someone choose a route.

04 / DESIGNING FOR THE REAL WORLD

Worked through road rules and data-feed edge cases.

I helped adapt the news-ticker concept for a billboard and worked through Department of Transportation rules about what we could say, along with color restrictions.

I also helped the team think through edge cases before they became live problems: What if both routes had delays or took the same amount of time? Should we change the messaging? What if the data feed dropped out for a minute? Which endpoint should define the drive we were describing?

05 / BUILDING AND TESTING THE PROTOTYPE

Built and tested a prototype for a screen that couldn’t stream.

I worked with a development partner to build the billboard experience from scratch. We used existing Waze for Cities technology to keep the build small enough to take on as an experiment. The billboard itself could not stream the site live, so we built a process that captured a screenshot of the website every minute and saved a fresh image for the screen to display.

Before launch, I arranged a real-world test on an unused billboard on Manhattan’s West Side. Seeing the experience at full scale gave the team a chance to assess it outside a browser.

06 / LAUNCH AND LEARNING

Launched the Houston pilot and learned the limits of scale.

We launched in Houston, where the billboard ran for a few weeks and created a lot of internal buzz. The project also showed us how few billboard locations across the country could support this kind of experience. It was unlikely to scale enough for us to measure brand awareness or sentiment meaningfully.

The prototype website became more valuable than a one-off billboard: it gave us an engine for trying different versions of the idea. I learned how to get a scrappy, distinctive experience live inside a large, slow-moving organization, while the team learned what this kind of out-of-home placement could and could not tell us.