Project’s Goals
- Design the FordPass 4.0 and localize Ford digital experience for the Chinese market
- Explore new services which could bring not only a joyful moment but also wow their potential customers
Ford Motor Company wants to launch a next-generation Ford pass 4.0 app in 2020. After doing business for many years in China, they discovered that customers in China have a very different way to use the Ford Pass compared wih people in the west. They tasked us to research into the market, develop insights and use it to design Ford Pass 4.0 to fit Chinese culture better and to ultimately encourage more customers to notice Ford is different by providing a new service that could bring a joyful moment to them and make them could show the Ford off to others.
User researches and insights
We did two rounds of user interviews and one round of user usability tests. I went to automobile Sales servicshop 4S for interviewing the sales and customers there. I also interviewed 10 car owners from Tier 1 to Tier 3 cities in China and drove the cars excluding the high-end brands. From the interviews we found some commonalities among the Chinese drivers, they priorities driving safety and most of them view their current car as temporary with a goal to change it to an SUV for more space shortly to take accommodate their family. This helped us narrow down our target users to family users. The second interviews were with users who have kids or drive SUV’s to understand their life, and what problems they have. After synthesis, we had a vivid user persona of whom we were designing for and what better experience we could bring them.
From the research I discovered some interesting insights, one of them is that Chinese consumers take car purchasing seriously and take their family’s opinions seriously. When I observe them drive with their family I notice there are some needs for passengers to control the IVI system such as changing; music, air conditioning or navigation. It lead me to think to make Ford Pass blend into users’ life, I should not only provide for the driver but also the passengers to give them an easy way to control functions in the car. It developed into to several concepts and I illustrated the storyboard for the client which was very well received and instrumental in their understanding of the concepts.
CONCEPTS
Step by step builds up the unique Ford digital experiences to blend FordPass into each touch points in the daily life and provide more services that help people enjoy driving time with others.
Outcome
I design and sketched out user flows and communicate with develpers in Ford. The flows were in great details including main task flows, all the error states, the UX specification was later handed over to the development team for the production phase. It will be launched on end of 2020 and show in the 2020 Shanghai International Automobile Industry Exhibition.
