Ford Motor Co.

SCAD collaborated with Ford Motor Company to assist in the research and development of a future digital assistant for its services and vehicles. I served as a UX researcher on the project, and played a key role in usability testing, prototyping, and the development of innovative concepts to help drivers accomplish all of the tasks they needed to while on the road. Disclaimer: The information contained herein was created as a prototype for a Savannah College of Art and Design course done in collaboration with Ford Motor Company and should not be considered an official representation of Ford Motor Company.

My Contributions

Throughout the course of the project, my role varied widely. In the beginning, I focused on understanding the existing digital assistants and the direction they were headed. Understanding the controls we needed to incorporate into the new touch screen system that would seamlessly flow together with the voice user interface. Later on, I produced wireframes to illustrate the concepts I developed, and created high-fidelity prototypes to demonstrate the functional improvements to the interface.

The Process

As is vital to the success of any project, understanding the user and the user’s needs is paramount. So I wrote stories for all of the future users of autonomous vehicles. Below is the process of creating those stories and sketches for a wheelchair user and an elderly woman.

First: User Journey Maps.

Second: Personas

Then:

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We began by sketching out the initial important moments in our user’s journey through their day, This helped give us more empathy and understanding of the lives of the people we were designing for.

With the insights from the users’ lives we started on the screens and the actual digital assistant (DA) itself.

We prototyped many features and services it would provide.

We also examined if the DA would be solely in the car or if it would have capabilities in the home as well. Would you be able to request your car from your cellphone? Or would it be able to run errands for you without you even asking?

Then once we had the stories and capabilities down, we could develop more refined storyboards.

These are some more storyboards, just illustrated in a different style.

Some more detailed storyboards, illustrating what an interaction with the DA might look like. We named the assistant Tiro after the Roman emperor. Based on my research, two-syllable named with vowels such as Siri are the most pleasing to users.