Xevo Glass

Role

VP, Design

Project Duration

2019-2022

Managed

5 direct reports

Business Model

SaaS • B2B

Overview

Xevo Glass is product suite for in-vehicle infotainment. The products include a HMI design system, AI recommendations, 3rd party map integration, 3rd party voice assistant integration, app store, app catalogue, editable themes, and an off-board management portal. OEMs can choose the full package or hand-pick the specific product they want to integrate.

Business Goals

Create new SaaS products that builds on our existing Market product and partner relationships.

Retain more users by providing a competitive product to CarPlay and Android Auto.

Provide a product suite that gives the OEM more control over their experience, new ROI opportunities, new after-sale opportunities, seamless 3rd party integrations, and extensibility.

The core strategic areas of focus should be recommendations, mapping, voice assistants, and themes.

User Goals

I want highly contextual, behavioral, and relevant recommendations, so that I can discover and effortlessly enter into corresponding task-flows.

I want an enriched mapping experience that includes merchant integrations, so that I can seamlessly interact with merchants features.

I want the in-vehicle voice assistant to work across all apps and their supported features, so that I can safely interact with them hands-free.

I want my in-vehicle experience to represent my personality, tastes, and interests, so that my vehicle and driving experience is uniquely mine.

Challenges

OEMs have deep and long lasting relationships with hardware providers like Harman or Bosch. These providers handcuff the OEM to waterfall software development processes. This means new vehicles have 3-5 year old technology and experiences. They are not living products with ongoing OTA updates due to large CR costs imposed by the hardware providers. These Head Unit providers do not provide SDKs or APIs, which create a system of fragmentation.

Data is incredibly expensive for OEMs. The experiences are almost always gated behind various data service packages. For new vehicles these data services are available for a few months free, but often don’t convert the users at the end of the trial. Users tend to lean on Android Auto and CarPlay as understood and reliable products at no cost.

Mapping and Voice Assistants are not products we plan to build from scratch. We need to form strategic relationships with providers where we can enrich their experiences with our Merchant and AI recommendation technology.

Design Process

Process summary

Problem space

What is the business value?
Who are our users, what are their needs, and what tasks must they complete?
What does success look like for our business and users?
Observe your user’s in their natural environment. Keep the process organic for accurate findings.
Ask questions that are as open as possible.
The goal is not to validate your own assumptions.
Evaluate, interpret, and weigh findings gathered.
Create requirements.
Create user stories, user journeys, and other preferred guidance documents.

Solution space

1. Information architecture
2. Low fidelity feature flows
3. High fidelity compositions
4. Design system
5. High fidelity feature flows
Early feature concepts were built as interactive flows in InVision or as light-weight locally deployed builds for testing. After proven successful they are handed-off to dev for implementation.
InVision interactive prototypes or light-weight locally deployed builds were used to test early concepts.
After features were tested successfully they were handed-off to dev. They were then released to customers where we collected analytics, were given feedback, and conducted on-site studies.

Context + Recommendations

When and how do you message a Driver?

Depending on what state the vehicle is in the method for presenting information to the Driver will differ. Is the Driver in Park or Drive gear position. If in Drive, then is the Driver in-motion and above 5mph or not? These questions determine when and how you can present information for most OEMs. Safety is critical and OEMs are, believe it or not, incredibly risk adverse.

As you could imagine context is VERY important. What you put in front of a User MUST be relevant. A couple irrelevant and out-of-context suggestions immediately devalue the feature to the User. You don’t want to design a simple marketing campaign that blasts Drivers with recommendations because they viewed/clicked something once before.

These are just a couple example subjects/topics we solved for with Xevo Glass. I won’t bore you with all the details, but it involves data and it’s appropriate usage.

X1 - Launcher@2x.png — AI Recommendations

Highly contextual recommendations are displayed based on time-of-day, day-of-week, week-of-month, month-of-year, who is in the car, vehicle telemetry, user service integrations, and usage/behavioral data.
These recommendations can appear as notifications, overlays, on-arrival panes, search results, and more.
They solve the discovery problem plaguing the in-car experiences today. They introduce the full value of their vehicle to their users.

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X1 - Launcher – 5@2x.png — Maps

In-vehicle mapping services are a user expectation. Unfortunately, OEMs position mapping services behind expensive service packages. So, how do you prevent further adoption of Android Auto or Apple CarPlay?
To differentiate and strengthen an OEMs mapping product we provide a juiced-up AI and 3rd party merchant integration experience.

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X1-Voice-4@2x.png — Voice Assistant

Voice always comes with a bundle of problem statements. A dedicated voice UX beats out design solutions that piggy-back off of existing task-flows. What about user adoption? How do user’s familiarize themselves with with the feature and what is supported?

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Themes

Editable themes make branding vehicle Make and Model a breeze and introduce user personalization, which leads into after-sale opportunities.
Users love personalization. It strengthens a user’s relationship with a product as they feel more ownership over their experience.

Scalable

Map styles, fonts, icons, cards, keyboards, voice assistants, and the rest of an OEMs design system is authorable post-launch.
Cascading Styles

Our design system provides seamless 1st and 3rd party integration.
Portal

A CMS for Theme management and delivery to targeted vehicles.

Portal Overview

X1 - Launcher – 4@2x.png — Task Management

We designed an intuitive task management system that 1st and 3rd party apps could integrate into. Tasks you may have started, in or outside of the vehicle, are managed organically within the in-car experience. Users no longer need to keep apps running in the foreground and go through refresh cycles to manage their open tasks.

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[M1] Cluster-Routing Improvements@2x@2x.png — Instrument Cluster

Heads-up display information on the instrument cluster that works in partnership with the infotainment display.

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Market

Fuel, ev-charging, food, parking, services, reservations, tolling, events, banking, and more.

All that you expect from your web and mobile experiences are built for the drive. Automotive industry has been largely stagnate until Tesla forced the hands of automakers to invest more into their in-vehicle experiences. Questions over what you can and cannot do safely in the vehicle are constantly evolving and challenged. As of now, they are still highly regulated and we have developed a series of templates for hundreds of use-cases that are Driver Distraction approved.