In 2019 I was asked to support out team in California. A client wanted to relaunch its brand with a new fleet of luxury electric vehicles. My job was to create the rough concept of the onboard system and showcase them with prototypes. When I got there our team already created brand experience principles which helped us tremendously in decision making and getting traction in the process.
The client had a heritage which he was proud of and bought top design and management talents from big players all over the world.
But still there was an old league of engineers, creatives and CTOs which were convinced that processes and systems from 15 years ago will do just fine, as they did before. (which they didn’t)
So, my job was not only to create and visualize a new system. It was also necessary to identify, analyze and break those old perceptions and habits.
One of the biggest issue was the remote interaction of the system. The interior designers visioned elegant control elements, smoothly laid into the curves of the seats and console. A system which premium OEMs introduced two decades ago and became a standard for low complex systems like car HMIs. But our system had different requirements. Future readiness means being prepared for unknown content and unknown complexity. The business model will only succeed if third parties can participate in the experience.
The driving motor of technology and service design is the mobile device segment. Here are innovations distributed and validated.
Therefore the requirements of the mobile world will be crucial to the cilents business plan.
The main issue with remote interaction is A the abstraction and B the limitation in selection.
Most systems rely on UP/DOWN, LEFT/RIGHT movement, with a CONFRIMATION and mostly accompanied by additional interactions.
But not only is it more and more becoming unintuitive to not interact with the content directly.
It is also limiting the possibilities and stretches interaction into long rows of single steps.
“RIGHT, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, SELECT.”
This is something many of the clients employees did not understand as they were stuck in the experience of established systems.