DUE TO A NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT,
INFORMATION ON THIS PROJECT IS LIMITED.
THE TOPIC
WLTP is a laboratory test, that measures fuel consumption as well as CO₂ and pollutant emissions from passenger cars. The introduction made it harder to reach certification guidelines for European car manufacturers. Due to high fees, if certain goals & limitations were not reached, emission data needed to be taken into account for decisions for more departments and a lot earlier in the development period of cars.
Urbanised areas
Motorway
Low
Medium
High
SPEED
TIME
TEST PROCEDURE COMPARISON FOR PASSENGER CARS
THE SETUP
The project ran over two years and four cycles, with the outcome of three different digital products. For two of them, my role included leading the specialist research as well as owning the UX concept. All products were based on a living design system, that ensured seamless usability across the products. For the product covered here, the team consisted out of 2–4 designers, 10 developers, and 2 project roles and ran dual-track agile scrum after the MVP phase.
Work Stream
HIGH-LEVEL-ROADMAP FOR THE MVP PHASE OF AUTOMOTIVE CERT
Co-Creation sessions
Testing Session with Users & Project Team
Service Design
UX Design
Frontend Dev.
Middleware & Backend Dev., Testing
April
Sprint 0
MVP Refinement
Checkun / Adjustments
Post-MVP Planning
User Research
Synthesis of
User Research
Click Dummies
Software & Click Dummies
Software
Software
Software & Click Dummies
Continuous Validation
MVP Definition
Information Architrecture
Fearure Design
Bux Fixing Support
Setup Environment
Implementation
Preparation
Feature Implementation
Bux Fixing
Bux Fixing
Post-Release Support
Setup Environment
Implementation
Preparation
Feature Implementation
Bux Fixing
Bux Fixing
Post-Release Support
Sprint 2
Sprint 4
Sprint 6
Sprint 8
Sprint 10
Sprint 1
Sprint 3
Sprint 5
Sprint 7
Sprint 9
May
June
July
August
Feature
Freeze
MVP
Release
September
THE CHALLENGE
The client's IT solution was based on excel, which only very few people could operate, creating a bottleneck for the certification process. Without a certification, no vehicle could be sold in almost any of the important markets. As the excel workflow was good enough to fix some problems in the short run, the client needed a better solution to:
a) collect WLTP and make the data available to other departments as early as possible
b) provide a »data playground« for engineers for fast & informed decision making.
TALKING POINTS
Due to confidentiality most of the research material cannot be shown publically. There here are some crucial talking points, we came across along our journey.
01
User-Centered vs. Data-Centered Design
02
The Role of Design in a highspeed, highly complex Development Environment
03
The Challenge to replace Excel-based Solutions in Corporate Engineering Production & Development Chains
THE PRODUCT
The »Data Playground« idea was the main guidance, that leads through the 2-year design process of exploration and orientation. The solution needed to be flexible to answer the user's need to be hidden within the data. Discoverability was the main aspect to led the user to explore not only the pure data but their behavior and relation within interdependent data points connected through the physical rules of the machine.
Calculation speed was a major aspect of usability as millions of calculations needed to be run in order to complete a single request. So effective queuing has been part of the design concept to assure reliable data availability even in peak times.