One Voice - the next generation of infotainment system
The average American spends over 17,600 minutes a year driving a car. In a single journey, the driver receives a flood of information that they are expected to use relative to their surroundings and to make critical, near-spontaneous decisions.
This project envisions how this information can be restructured, organized, and presented to users in a way that provides multiple controls for efficient and seamless interaction with their driving system.
Project overview
This project came to my team from our long-time client Toyota Motors, but from a new direction. However, while Toyota Japan has historically been in charge of creating the next generation of information and navigation systems in their vehicles, Toyota North America decided to take matters into their own hands. With their declining JD Power quality scores in North America and increasing customer complaints, Toyota North America wanted to develop their own next generation system through local UX teams.
This became an opportunity for us to expand our relationship with Toyota. As Toyota Japan was our main client when it came to building next-gen systems, we decided to demonstrate our expertise and apply our well-oiled UX process to conduct user research, support conception and implementation, and show the value of the team and the impact of UX design.
Toyota’s question was as simple as it was broad:
“What does the next generation of dashboard experience look like?”
To address it, we decided to utilize two areas for information display: gauge and main navigation display. As the design was for the next generation, we knew we had to be realistic in implementation while enhancing the current experience.
My Role & Responsibility
As a lead designer on the team, my role was to lead and support the UX process and contribute to creating a solution that would satisfy our client and implement the design as two final promotypes for the future of Lexus and Toyota. My role led to many personal growth opportunities and increased holistic awareness of the product development process.
My role
Designed the onboarding experience as well as account settings in the information system.
Designed thinking activities and led workshops on brand analysis and moodboard generation.
Led usability testing for initial concept.
Mentored interns and new designers, provide direction and oversee their design process and implementation.
My responsibility
Ensure adherence to UX design process, without overlooking certain steps.
Provide tangible yet innovative design solutions to the client.
Mentor and guide new designers.
Create the promo-types and onboarding materials.
Manage the developers for implementation.
Validate solutions.
Personal Growth Opportunities
Leadership
Workshop and activity facilitation
Project management
Project Goals
Envision the future
Incorporate future interactions (voice, touch, gesture) to the system, creating a next generation of infotainment system for North American market.
Create coherent interface.
Create harmonious system design in all screens.
Improve usability issues.
Ensure safety, efficiency, and usability without training.
Incorporate brand representation.
Create unique treatments that successfully represent the Toyota and Lexus brands as future-forward and innovative.
Create and present a prototype.
Create testable prototypes of both Toyota and Lexus systems and present a comprehensive walkthrough of the process.
The overall process
Our UX team followed the double diamond process, which has been a great workflow for the team past few years. Under the supervision of our Design lead(JW), we were able to conduct synthesis sessions, design thinking workshops, and usability testing.
Discover
Understand our users
Understand the journeys
Understand business KPIs
Understand the branding
Methods:Contextual inquiry
Usability testing
Value study (participatory design) Competitor analysis
Heuristics analysis
Task analysis
Steep analysis
Define
Experience principles
The opportunity areas
Methods:How might we?
Mood boards
Journey maps
Personas
Experience principles
Develop
System architecture
Concept modeling
Information architecture
New features
Define Interactions between the screen and hardware
Branding/Visual design
Methods:Concept testing
GUI and VUI design
Hardware product design
Re-branding
Deliver
‘Promo-type’
Onboarding instruction video
Usability testing
Methods:Lo-fi, high-fi GUI & hardware Prototyping
Usability testing
Discover.
Our discovery process was driven by both business and user perspectives. We wanted to find out the business requirements of Toyota North America and how a variety of data sources defined the user needs. Both business and user needs would also be represented in Toyota and Lexus’ brand analysis, which set expectations for users and gave us an idea of where we might find a balanced solution.
Business needs
The beginning of our project with Toyota began with one question: where did the business stand? Toyota North America’s low JD Power Initial Quality Score (IQS) and dissatisfied user feedback provided a solid ground for the idea that their designs were not competitive by industry standards and unfit for the North American market. This led to our second question: what were the business goals?
Through interviews with stakeholders, we understood that:
They wanted Toyota North America to become its own entity to support North American users and customers.
They wanted to raise the JD Power Score and the brand’s reputation as a reflection of increased customer satisfaction.
In order to accomplish these goals, we knew that we first needed to understand North American user needs and the brand’s unique traits.
User needs
As a good old consultant to Toyota Japan for many years, our UX team already had years of data collected through various projects for North American users. We revisited these data sources to re-gain an understanding of user needs. We reviewed walls with verbatim and insight notes fully covered. This activity was crucial to some of the newly joined designers and interns to gain empathy.
We reviewed:
Usability testing findings
Driving scenarios
Benchmarks
Value studies
User ethnography
My team also revisited affinity notes created by the Design lead(JW) and myself, synthesizing them into an affinity diagram to see high-level themes. I reviewed the benchmark and competitor analysis created by previous researchers to understand what experiences were trending among users.
Key findingsSafety is First
Users’ biggest concern is their safety while driving. Despite of all the goodness that infotainment system provides, they did not want to risk their safety to use the system.
Don’t know it
One of the biggest pain points was that the many users don’t know how to use their system. There are no proper onboarding or walkthrough when they purchase the vehicle.
Nothing feels New
Users prefer to have their phone in the cup holder. The current infotainment system is outdated and slow.
Not so sharable
Sometimes their infotainment system is like a communal space, especially during the road trip with family. But they need to be stopped to switch the devices to listen to one’s playlist or send a next stop to the infotainment system.
Brand Analysis
To understand users’ expectations for the brand, our team had to examine the Toyota and Lexus brand itself. In our research, we focused on how the brand would align with specific consumers whose values matched what the brand was promoting, and how we might shift those same values into our designs for the new information system.
To understand the brand’s expectations, we:
Reviewed marketing materials such as past advertisements.
Visited dealerships to see how the brand was portrayed in an offline experience.
Key AttributesLexus:
Crafted | Sporty | Empowering | Inspiring | Future forward | Status driven
Toyota:
Adaptable(Something for everyone) | Two personalities | Friendly | Quirky | Practical - Straightforward and honest
Define.
After the discovery process, we were able to synthesize the data to define the three main personas and their journey maps. Utilizing the artifacts, we were able to identify the opportunity areas and define the user experience principles that will guide our design decisions.
Personas
With the patterns observed from our data, we generated pro-personas for Toyota, Lexus, and Subaru:
Soccer mom - irregular times, regular destination
Commuter - regular times, regular destination
Business man - irregular times, irregular destinations
These personals helped us identify the unique needs of different target groups and develop empathy with our users by understanding their motivations, goals, and frustrations. This would be a fundamental part of our design process as well as in our validation phase, as we had to prove that our solution would meet the needs for each persona.
Journey maps
Based on our user research, we identified the top three high-level tasks that our users were expected to perform while driving.
Navigate from A to B
Listen to music
Initiate and answer a phone call
These tasks would make up the arc of a driver’s journey. From here, we focused even more specifically on tasks unique to each persona to identify their individual pain points and emotional journeys.
Key pain pointsComplicated Structure
Users’ biggest pain point is that the system architecture was too complicated and not so conventional to understand and know how to use it intuitively.
System doesn’t learn
The system has no adaptive interaction based on the user’s context. Because the new standard of interaction and experience is now based off of the mobile experience, this was the big gap the users feel when using infotainment sytem.
Passenger Lockout
Users understand safety matters and necessity of a strict regulation implied by the government to limit the usage while driving. However, the current disruptive lockout feature isn’t well-balanced to keep users happy and safe.
Difficult Operation
The touchpad or controller is hard to use with the system. The touch display is also hard to use, especially while driving. The easiest one is the steering wheel controls, because it’s right in front of the users.
Define user experience principles
From our work defining user personas and their journey maps, I came to specific user experience principles that would build a system that would delight users and validate stakeholders and their goals.
Key AttributesLearn
System learns user’s behavior, their pref- erences, habits, routines, and comfort zones.
Adapt
System adapts user’s ways of doing things, voice inputs, commonly used tasks, and their external devices.
Anticipate
System anticipates user’s next move, next routine, and needs based on the context.
Automate
System automatically takes control in ciritical situations.
Create visual design direction - Mood board
I led the refinement of images gathered during our brand analysis into final mood boards that would serve as digital artifacts to help with ideation. We clustered images into themes and examined them by color, texture, shape, typography, and illustration to understand what might be the best future direction for Lexus and Toyota.
These mood boards were essential for visualizing the experience principles as not only interaction and flow, but as the specific UI components and the voice and tone of the design.
Develop
Ideation
With our problem and use cases defined, we ventured into high-level concepts with the intent to “go crazy.” We wanted to explore all possible solutions, focusing on conceptual modeling and “blue sky” ideas”
Designing System Structure
With all of our solutions from the ideation phase, we began to detail out the system architecture, and specifically considered hardware interaction.
Where should information be displayed? - Information architecture
One key challenge we need to solve was to give users what they need in the right time, but not overwhelm them. In order to do this, we defined what information is a must during driving and what information could be utilized in non-driving context. Then I created modes that clearly define how the system adapts and presents information that is relevant to the context.
During the drive, I provided information and functions where they don’t need to browse the system to find information. During non-driving context, that’s when user can start browsing information that they need, by utilizing the one-line search feature. They can use voice, type, or hand-write to input search words.
2. What is user-product relationship like? - Voice and tone
Since voice interaction was considered, I felt it was very important to define the voice and tone attributes. This led me expand my thoughts to what the experience should be like when providing information, alerting users, and providing suggestion.
By reviewing our experience principles and the attributes, I defined the voice and tone to be like Alfred and Batman. If a user is the batman, the system will be more gentle, subtle, and prestige, like Alfred. This metaphor helped the team to grasp how the system will behave and feel like to the users.
3. How would users know how to control the information? - Interaction and input
In designing the hardware aspects, I focused on ergonomics and mapping. Interactions would be based on input, which came in three forms:
Touch
Controller (Steering wheel and touchpad)
Voice
The final thing to consider in building the system architecture was its scalability to information systems across vehicles.
Designing the high-level flows
After designing the system architecture and gestures, we started to design the contents and the flow.
Not only the system design, I focused on designing some of the features that will addrss the pain points we identified in the journey maps and the affinity diagram.
1. Search feature encourages the personalization and provides more contextual search results.
System doesn’t learn | User journey map
2. Account management allows users to easily switch the devices and provide a sharing functionality between accounts. These features create the system to be more communal and sharable.
Not so sharable | Affinity diagram
3. Onboarding walkthrough is a video that runs in the beginning when user purchased the vehicle. This idea was generated when we visited the dealership, observing the interaction between the dealer and the customer. The onboarding walkthrough will be found in the search page as well.
Do not know it | Affinity diagramConcept evaluation
After designing high-level solution approach, I conducted a quick user testing to see if the concept is understandable and easy to use. The main things I wanted to validate were:
1. the idea of split screen is well adapted to users
2. assigning initial interaction area in the instrumental panel would improve usability
3. the idea of not having “home menu” structure.
The results had some positive and negative feedback. Users did struggle a little bit using the controller to understand the behaviors. The split screen was not well adapted first, that users did not understand that they can move information across three screens. However, they started to pick up the system architecture and the interaction with couple trial and error. Overall, the experience wasn’t bad, but there were definitely some areas to tighten up.
Deliver.
Service catalog
The design lead(JW) created a service catalog that captures all the great ideas we had when we brainstormed during the blue sky ideation. I contributed by logging the blue sky ideas the team produced.
2. Promotype
Having developed the system’s structure and visual design, we created a promotype that would not only undergo validation but also promote our product.
I contributed on the quality check on the implementation to ensure that the promotype would be built as we had envisioned.
With the product built, we began user testing to validate its functionality using internal testers. With additional refinement based on user feedback, we were ready for final validation.
3. Validation
We conducted a comparative evaluation of our system, comparing the promotype to two other prototype systems that would precede our own system. After testing two high-fidality prototypes with actual drivers, we found out that users understand how system works, but it’s not yet natural to use. During our next steps, we will focus more on natural interactions, such as modality switching between steering wheel controls to touchscreens.
Conclusion.
After final validation, Toyota reviewed our prototype, compiled learnings, and testing results. They ultimately concluded that the interface was not within the scope, as touch-possible hardware was out of scope despite being determined as necessary. While our findings were not yet tangible to implement, they were considered on-the-nose in terms of Toyota’s future-oriented vision, and our team was recently informed that the design is considered for the next generation of Toyota North American vehicles.