The specificities of the driving experience were kept front and center when designing the layout of the center console screen.
The need to constantly adjust personalized settings in a shared vehicle is eliminated with UWB-enabled profiles.
Precise trailer hitching usually requires a spotter and multiple manual corrections.
The in-vehicle experience design team at General Motors wanted us to identify where the centimeter-level precision and seamless detection of UWB could deliver the most value.
After conducting desk research on the technology, I quickly realized that a huge benefit of UWB is personalization and automation. In a vehicle, this could be a game-changer.
I conducted four user interviews with drivers of larger vehicles to discover what manual processes cause them friction. Two main themes emerged: sharing a vehicle and hitching a trailer cause a lot of frustrating manual adjustments.
3 of 4 participants
frequently share a vehicle and manually reconnect their phone.
3 of 3 participants
who share a vehicle always manually adjust their seat, but rarely adjust the mirrors or steering column.
2 of 2 participants
who use a trailer with their vehicles noted that hitching is a multi-person, high-stress task.
To overcome these pain points, I came up with a driver-vehicle-trailer system that automates the high-friction parts of the user journey using UWB.
I initially thought drivers would want a 'Personalization Hub.' However, testing with users revealed that it was more intuitive to personalize the individual features under their respective sections rather than under a profile section.
By leveraging UWB’s pinpoint accuracy, the design automatically identifies the driver, loads their ergonomic and comfort preferences on entry, and empowers them with hands-free trailer hitching that removes one of the most frustrating tasks of driving a large vehicle.
At the end of this project, I had the opportunity to present my designs to stakeholders from the General Motors design team.
