SmartAuto by Harmon

SmartAuto is a device that plugs into your car. Your car essentially has a computer inside of it with access to a multitude of data about your cars systems. This data is called telematics and it can be used in all sorts of interesting ways from knowing how safely you are driving to whether your car has a technical or mechanical issue.

This was a startup at a very early stage. They had put together an MVP, enough to get funded by Samsung as a main partner. It was at the stage where they had an app designed by developers and now it was time to look at it properly from A UX design perspective.

Working with a team of 3 designers we started to understand as much as we could about telematics and the aspirations of the founders. Working with the lead product owner we worked through a story map to understand all of the features the service was going to provide and identified a product roadmap for the more advanced features

Following a design sprint process we started to sketch ideas for the features that we could work on. The technology was complex and it was challenging to get the necessary info we needed to actually start designing features. Often times we would use Swagger to read the api documentation so we could get an understanding of the features that had been built.

This project was different to most in that it was incredibly difficult to perform conventional User testing. This was because the app relied on the hardware device to be connected to a real car. We did however have a testing device that represented the car interface that we could plug the hardware dongle in. This wasn’t great, it wasn’t very reliable so mostly I had to rely on research papers to understand human behaviour when driving and other HCI studies with vehicle interaction.

It was fun to work on an experience that was beyond most simple read only apps. The geofencing feature for example allowed users to track multiple vehicles so thinking about using multiple gestures with maps and custom map interfaces was one interesting aspect of the product design. Things we had to think about lighting situations so we designed a day and night mode, emergency call out in the case of a roadside breakdown and how people would feel emotionally and stressed in these situations. How best could we design for a high emotionally charged state?

I think working witin automative as a UX designer is an incredibly interesting and emerging space and look forward to working some more in the future.