Customer research and mobile experience design of an updated high-fidelity prototype of FordPass towards intuitive use for the middle generation.
At this project's inception United Airlines operated only two different web tools for their cargo management side of business, whose unresponsive nature on mobile devices hindered and eliminated further possible use cases and experiences.
Our team updated these platforms with a responsive mobile app prototype that enables wider use cases for cargo ordering, tracking, and shipping,
UI experiences are nuanced, varied, and greatly numbered. The exploration phase of this project began with a wide analysis of inspiring user experiences and design features. Each team member selected pleasing elements of different apps, websites, and digital experiences, and funneled these into three categories: emotions, interactions, and features. An affinity diagram was then created with these many examples, allowing the grouping of analogous elements into five major emotional themes. Defining these themes of experience served to align the core of our designs.
A desirability model is a technique used in the early stages of understanding a concept around a design space. In the unknown beginning, this model serves as a representation of a user's most essential desires for a product or brand and its subsequent capabilities. Individuals may ask, "What can I do with this thing? How will it improve my life? How will that make me feel?"
Defining these emotional goals realized the conceptual implementation of FordPass through a lens that directs and guides imagined features, interactions, visual presentations, and technical interactions along a core set of resolute values. Anchoring these emotional qualities maintains an embedded focus on the user. Subsequent designs can be referenced to this model to ensure that their experience is still properly aligned towards the ideas and emotions that our core user group values.
In total, the model reads as, “Control and organization allow me to feel relaxed, powerful, and effective, because I can unlock my car, find my parking spot, and know my car’s health.”
Conducting a feature audit illuminated the capabilities, design features, and experiential qualities that exist within FordPass. We analyzed the app’s information architecture in order to gain a better understanding of each feature in context to the others, to identify gaps in the user journey, and to seek areas of design opportunity to uphold users' senses of control, organization, power, and effect. This analysis identified opportunities for improvement and ways in which new interpretations of our core emotional themes (efficient organization, visual engagement, accessibility, reliability, and familiarity) could be represented and designed to augment FordPass's UX.
Our goal for examining the information architecture of FordPass was to explore and map out the content currently present in the app. By doing so, we could see how a new idea based on emotion could fit into the existing architecture.
The Guides section was dense, including many repeated topics for directions. Organization was unstructured and confusing with no consistency between screens. There is room for elaboration within Maps. Home Screen may provide opportunities for an addition.
To get our feet on the ground and learn more about firsthand accounts with FordPass, we conducted an informal interview with a fifty year old individual who has owned two Ford vehicles and uses FordPass frequently. We learned of his likes and dislikes and noted how these reactions impacted the emotions he felt when interacting with the app. Connecting with someone's stories face-to-face and in context of the actual product developed a more nuanced, precise understanding of the human experience produced through this mobile app.
The team visited the local Ford dealership in hopes of talking to the salespeople to learn more about the app and its introduction with new car owners. Engaging in contextual inquiry, goals were focused on understanding what pain points drivers encounter in the vehicle-app combination space, as well as in highlighting what features of FordPass stand out in sales.
Waiting for the appropriate moment of when knowledge of a user group and understanding of the app are both mindfully and throughly established allows for ideation to flourish. Several rounds of sketching succeeded the development of core user desires and exploration of existing user experiences. These practices engaged the portrayal of what control looks like in a UI, of how the existing app could be augmented with different interactions and flows, and how we could tailor new UX processes to address concerns uncovered in interviews and contextual inquiry.
From starting broadly in a generative, sketch-all manner, to focusing ideation on designs that acutely address pain points uncovered in research, core app functions were focused into four major interactions: scheduling a vehicle start, controlling the climate, locking and unlocking the vehicle, and starting the engine. Working in a piecewise manner continually informed by cascading UX research insights allowed these ideation to born in a truly user-centered fashion.
Drawing from previously established necessities for maintaining major, simple-yet-effective controls, different interpretations of app design sketches were manifested in medium-fidelity format. Affordances were kept to a clean, simple nature with keen attention paid to ease-of-use and obvious buttons to help with a higher adoption curve for an older user base.
Concept testing was chosen as a form of user testing to hone in on the natural learnability of these designs. Quick, natural adoption was the goal for user's experiences. Direct user feedback on the overall accessibility of these designs and how mental models are formed around the buttons, features, and wording contributed to a solidified, cohesive experience.
Alas, the FordPass redesign. The continued testing and iteration led to a focused, clean, and simple layout. The design refrains from exhibiting excess colors to avoid user overwhelm. Different, powerful features take center stage: starting the engine, unlocking the car, and setting the interior climate. Motorists are also able to locate their vehicle and program a scheduled ignition start. Utilizing pop-up, card interactions on the UI prevented a mess of cluttered information architecture and allowed users to stay in control, always.
The research and redesign for FordPass contained a multitude of different layers and phases. Lessons from failures taught this team how to deal with chaos and uncertainty. Passing through different shifting project parameters and facing multiple, externally imposed scope realignments challenged our team's ability to stay determined, courageous, and explorative. We determined how to keep moving forward, exploring, and creating in the midst of ambiguity, eventually discovering a compelling user base and set of needs that informed an interesting production.
Published academic paper in the human-computer interaction field exploring the behavior of social group formation in gaming spaces
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