TCL OnRoad Android app
Design
This is TCL OnRoad, a mobile Android application which blends navigation, parking, communication, audio, and voice interaction all into a single space in order to support and ease a driver's experience behind the wheel.
Background
Company
Founded in 1981, TCL is a Chinese electronics company that designs, develops, and manufactures TVs, mobile phones, and large and small electrical appliances.
Project
As a handset manufacturer, they’ve extended beyond operating systems for their electronics into mobile applications for their phones. TCL launched a restaurant reservation app, which simplified the process of discovering, reserving, and communicating a reservation amongst a group of users. The standout feature of this application was the voice assistant, and TCL wanted to extend their perceived voice assistance success into the US market, this time in a driving assistance app.
Organization
Team
Ixonos: 1 Interaction Lead, 1 Visual Lead, 2 Interaction Designers, 1 Researcher, 1 User Tester, 1 Project Manager
TCL: 1 Product Owner, 1 Product Lead, 2 Product Managers, 1 Lead Engineer, and an engineering team in China
My role
Lead UI design, prototyping, competitive analysis, stakeholder presentations, user testing feedback collection, interaction collaboration and design reviews
How we worked
Process: weekly agile sprints with user testing
Communication: Basecamp, Slack, InVision, weekly onsite meetings
Success definition
Successful installs: 500k / 6 months
Active users: 100k per month
Problem insights
In order to better understand the user and business problems, we used a couple information collection tools.
Competitive analysis defined many best practices by Google, Apple, and Tesla along with smaller players Audio, Communications, and Navigation apps across mobile.
We used SurveyMonkey to collect user feedback on driving habits, needs, pain points, and driving assistance focused products, which we merged with client marketing data.
Looking at the problem
Prioritizing problems
As we evaluated the research findings, we started identifying our key problems to solve.
Problems: Safety, Feature Interactivity, and Voice Interaction
Safety
Interacting with your phone is unsafe: multi-tasking app eases cognitive load but interacting with it increases it – When can parallel processing paths ease user experience?
Feature interactivity
Merging streams gets noisy: example - hearing navigation instructions through audio
Voice interactions
Voice interactions can be unintuitive, lack context, or never be used
Results & takeaways
Missing strategy, great team
My team was amazing: supportive, smart, diligent, empowered
No go-to market strategy created lack of focus