VEHICLE PERSPECTIVE FEATURE
I came up with this interface idea and shared with the client. The client was very excited over the proposed feature.
I came up with this interface idea and shared with the client. The client was very excited over the proposed feature.
Strategy:
As a part of the customer experience division, we research competitive vehicles, create customer journeys and lead design thinking exercises to create concepts. User testing documenting customer experience of concept features using drones and GoPro 9’s.
Goal:
The initial goal was limited to creating a vehicle feature which will communicate with traffic lights to predict when lights will change. Original concept relied upon existing UI and my goal was to remove the disruptive popups in vehicle clusters as much as possible. Removing the popups was a problem no one could solve within Ford. So I was challenged again: "How do you design a UI which could accommodate multiple warnings without popups?" I was told by my local leadership my idea was bigger then our area and needed to be shared and proposed up the executive chain immediately.
Solution:
Research competitors and determine infrastructure communication feasibility. Create a wireframe path of the worse case scenario. Sketch possible solutions. My final concepts were derived from driving competitor vehicles, documenting the experience. Looking to other industries, specifically video games and VR/AR. The concept is similar to what you see below, which mapped the real world placing it in the cluster. I designed a worse case scenario of 4 possible vehicle warnings at the same time. (In this concept I changed the vehicle to a generic vehicle). The concept removed popups which no one else in the company thought of to date. Most importantly, I changed the vehicle perspective to behind the bumper, allowing for more advanced visual warnings of upcoming driver issues. The layout was very friendly toward future advanced Ford features in development which also required warnings of events down the road.
Research:
Initial research included driving competitive vehicles, video game UI and gameplay analysis. As well as design thinking clinics using Lightning Decision Jams to help narrow down feature scope.
Tesla does something similar to this feature proposal, but it will not be able to accommodate future V2I and V2V features involving advanced warnings due to their vehicle perspective being behind and above the car and the beige fog surrounding car limiting viewing range. My solution used the video game view perspective as inspiration. The idea was to graphically map the real world in your cluster using a different perspective to allow no to infrastructure communications which will become popular in the future.
The following images were used as inspiration.
The simulated environment helped to visualize the warnings with audio promos to reduce popups. Similar to a driving based video game environment.
