Heads up app
This project started with a very vague brief from the HERE leadership to multiple HERE teams, requesting that we collaborate with Facebook to develop a competitor to WAZE. Therefore, the first challenges were to create a concept to unify the parallel work streams and then, open a dialogue with Facebook.
The approach to the concept was to identify and deep dive on all the user research available in the company related to traffic and congestion experiences. With that in mind, I created a mental model that reflected the different needs in different moments of the process and used that to collect ideas from the different teams, consolidating the approach.
We formulated a common vision of what the problem we wanted to address was - the stress caused by the loss of control - and how we would envision to solve this.
With this concept in hand we started discussions with the Facebook maps team, and got their feedback and coaching towards steps to make this into a reality.
We trimmed the experience to focus on the pre-departure information rather than the during the journey changes and produced a coded prototype that was released to a select group of testers and evaluated weekly to verify if the design and existing data was valuable enough to generate the usage levels that would justify the investment.
The first iteration aimed at solving two key problems: the amount of information being displayed at the main screen and the absence of a map, that did not allow users to verify what route the app was using to provide the estimated journey duration times.
We solved these issues as well as investigated how this product could exist as a micro app within the Facebook ecosystem, focusing on the social aspect and sharing traffic data in a different and more contextual way, such as comparing the traffic speed to that of some animals. Imagining that a giraffe could get there faster would help ease the frustration of a slow commute.
In this project I managed the concept and served as the lead designer, responsible for briefing the initial visual concepts and for producing the vision, communicating that to all stakeholders (both in HERE and Facebook, doing all interaction design and refinements for the prototypes. I was co-responsible for the definition and reporting of metrics for the product, acting as a designer / product manager hybrid.
After two rounds of iterations HERE decided not to continue the investment on the product.
Berkeley, HERE, 2015
