Tag: Research

While at the AT&T Foundry, I led an Augmented Reality project to create a pre-visualization tool for filmmakers, specifically camera crews and directors in collaboration with Quantum Interface, Economist Media Lab, and teammates at Ericsson Research. Together, our team conducted user research, designed, and implemented a complete voice and natural gesture controlled Hololens solution to a prevalent need for film crews within three days at the Fox Studios Hackathon in June 2016.

In June 2016, we were invited by the Fox Innovation Lab to build an augmented reality concept to improve the entertainment production process using the Microsoft HoloLens. In response, we created Spike, a tool that helps filmmakers streamline their pre- and post-production processes by tagging sets with virtual camera marker “spikes” and visualizing adjustments to camera settings. This same concept can be applied to other virtual objects in other contexts as described in the presentation video below.

As the first Foundry AR/VR project, this success demonstrated the value of this technology solving real use cases beyond the gaming industry. It has since sparked interest in looking deeper into Augmented and Virtual Reality with further explorations into other industries and spurred discussions across the company.

Quantum Interface’s video of our proof of concept showcasing their innovative interface technology.

Just like many other large, established companies, AT&T finds itself in an interesting situation of needing to deal with a world of dramatically increasing scale and complexity. For decades, experienced company veterans have been able to address these challenges manually with the knowledge, skills, and intuition they have built over a career in their roles.

However, we are now reaching a scale where this is no longer feasible, and we are facing a host of problems that cannot be manually addressed. By building intelligent systems, we bring radical efficiency changes to how AT&T operates. These are orders of magnitude improvements, where something that may have taken months manually, may now take only an hour.

Along with my user experience research and design skills, my team built one such intelligent system to manage this complexity for network capacity engineers as they decommission legacy machines on the network. Our tool was extremely well received by our colleagues in the field and is currently being used in decommissioning to save unnecessary hours of labor and costs.

AT&T’s legacy telephone wire system is made of automated, interconnected switches on a nationwide scale and has been around for decades. Maintaining this vast network requires a significant amount of money spent towards power. Naturally, AT&T is interested in finding equipment that can be decommissioned or replaced with newer, more efficient equipment in an effort to reduce this large footprint, all with an active, live network that must remain fully reliable through this process.

Currently, decommissioning a machine requires weeks or months of tedious, manual planning by highly experienced and trained engineers, each with their own personalized workflow.

We created an assistive tool for network capacity engineers to reduce this time to hours by recommending better alternatives to free them for their other responsibilities. Our tool helps discover and recommend plans for removing equipment from the network.

Our project focused on two primary objectives:

1. Evaluating network equipment to establish a priority order for decommissioning.
2. Creating and recommending a valid circuit reassignment plan for operators to take into consideration.

While my colleagues were developing the machine learning aspects to this project, I conducted user interviews to better understand the needs of a network capacity engineer to inform our product decisions.

As themes in their workflows arose, I developed quick mockups to encapsulate the needs I was hearing.

I continued to iterate on them as our understanding of the user needs evolved.

As we were on a short timeline, my colleague quickly began implementing a working web-interface prototype as per my designs to connect the command line into a more user-friendly experience. Within a few days, we had a fully functioning version of the tool that we could share with our users.

Through usability testing with network capacity engineers, we identified tens of changes to our working prototype and continued to iterate.

Today, this internal tool is used by network capacity engineers across the company and is radically changing the way AT&T works. This product was so successful in creating an efficiency disruption within the company that more work of this nature is being requested by internal teams. I found this highly impactful project extremely gratifying. With just a few months of applied work, we were able to disrupt an internal process to save costs and significantly change how the company and employees operate day to day.

I joined the Ericsson team at the AT&T Foundry in Fall 2015, and my experience has been extremely diverse and fulfilling. My work spans a number of disciplines and industries as we work to create innovative solutions to challenging problems.

The AT&T Foundries are a network of six innovation centers across the world–Palo Alto, Atlanta, Houston, Plano (2), and Israel, each sponsored by a different company or internal organization. In Palo Alto, we are sponsored by Ericsson and jointly innovate with team members from both AT&T and Ericsson. As a member of the Ericsson team at the AT&T Foundry, I serve as a bridge between the two companies.

The Foundries were originally created several years ago as an open, collaborative environment to inspire and promote the rapid invention and innovation of strategic ideas from concept to commercialization. Foundry team members drive their own projects and champion them to stakeholders, much like entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. Projects emerge from personal passions, business unit needs, external partnership opportunities, and our employee crowdsourcing platform.

As one of the top internal brands to AT&T, we are highly regarded internally as the reliable source of all types of innovation, with a special focus on efficiency and disruptive innovations.

I was hired to lead design at the Foundry, and since then I’ve led numerous design projects, trained up team members, and worked on initiatives to bring design thinking to all of AT&T. I am frequently consulted on how to apply design to products, teams, processes, and business models. My work ranges from exploratory research to ideation to prototyping and implementation.

Projects

For instance, since 2016, I have collaborated with my teammate on the design portion of building a highly trafficked, enterprise product to provide a complete, seamless, self-service experience to incubate and validate any virtual network function against AT&T’s Domain 2.0 Architecture as part of the release of ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy). Check out some press on this project and how we are in the process of open sourcing it in 2017:

Has AT&T ICE’ed VNF Onboarding?
AT&T ICEs Vendors of Virtual Network Functions

In 2015, I immersed myself with our key enterprise customers to understand their needs and expectations around our new Network on Demand product. My research uncovered key product strategies and features that our team was able to champion both companies.

In 2016, I led design for yet another engaging, enterprise design project, though for an internal tool this time. Our efficiency innovation reduced the time for network capacity engineers to plan out how to decommission legacy network machines from several weeks to hours.

Leadership

Over the years as the head of design at the Foundry, I have trained my teammates in design thinking through collaborative projects, coaching, mentorship, and workshops. In turn, my colleagues are now applying design thinking to their work and even leading training sessions of their own.

One such instance occurred in 2016 when my colleague and I conducted interactive design thinking workshops for middle school and high school women interested in technology. Read more about our contribution here: AT&T hosts Girls in Future Technologies (GIFT) Day

My design team has found success identifying and solving difficult problems they could never have imagined in short periods of time through my guidance. One team member dove into understanding the needs of Uverse and DirecTV installation and maintenance technicians for several weeks. His research uncovered so many high impact opportunities that when we presented our work to the Senior Vice President responsible for these teams, the SVP allocated millions of dollars in resources to addressing these findings immediately.

While at the Foundry, I have had the pleasure to engage with hundreds of startups working in emerging technologies. In early 2016, I became especially curious to learn more about augmented and virtual reality and identified it as a high potential path to new revenue streams.

With my market research, I educated, championed, and began the dialogue within AT&T to apply these emerging technologies to our business strategy. As concrete demonstrations of strategic AR/VR plays, I sought out and developed strong partnerships with leaders in the industry to create cutting-edge projects.

In one such project, my partners and I created an augmented reality, spatial tagging tool for camera teams and film production crews using the Hololens in collaboration with FOX Studios.

In another, my partners and I developed hands-free, interactive, virtual reality entertainment experiences for hospitalized children and tested immersive entertainment as a form of distraction therapy.

Along with our numerous technology and design projects, marketing, partnerships, and thought leadership are similarly top of mind. I have contributed on visual design, information architecture, content strategy, startup partners, and developing marketing and brand collateral for several key initiatives, some of which are elaborated below.

Specifically, six times a year, we host the Futurecast Series, where we invite an honored guest to participate in a deconstructed panel where the curated audience is invited to participate in the conversation between the guest and moderator. Before the discussion, we also invite relevant startups to demo their latest and greatest to attendees. All our past and future events can be found on our website.

In 2016, we also began the Futurist Reports. In this series, we dig into technologies and trends while highlighting key insights that are reshaping entire industries and our world-at-large. Each report includes an industry-wide view from a diverse array of leading experts and features select startups at the forefront of technology. We delve into broader business implications of these technologies and explore indicators such as collaborations, investments, market demands, and technology advancements. Check out our latest reports on the Future of Drones and the Future of Entertainment.

Summer of 2015, I joined Esper, a small startup working on improving time management and productivity, as a consulting Product and Design Strategist. In collaboration with the founders, I guided the company through several key strategic pivots, including shifting us from providing services to focusing on building great products. I also led the team’s Product Design by conducting user research interviews and creating interaction flows, wireframes, and mockups. The journey of working in a small, roughly six person startup environment, where my voice has a significant impact on our direction, has been extremely fun and fulfilling.

Over the course of my two years working with Esper, I have been fortunate to influence several iterations of company direction. When I joined, the team had built a productivity product for Executive Assistants. To better improve their product, they dogfooded it on themselves by creating essentially an Uber for Executive Assistants, where Executives would be matched with Esper Executive Assistants 24/7, and the EAs hired by Esper would then use the Esper product to perform quality and efficient work.

Soon after I joined, I realized that we had learned what we needed from our service. As a team, we decided to close the service and shift our focus back to building an amazing product for EAs and Executives. We also discovered some unique insights into how the best of the best EAs worked. For instance, these EAs not only handled tactical scheduling for their Executives, they also strategically managed their Executive’s time.

I took findings like these and proposed several strategic directions beyond our scheduling and calendaring assistant product. One of these, in particular, stuck with the team, and we dove into building our next product, Esper Charts. With Charts, anyone can strategically manage their time by quickly analyzing how they are currently using it. We essentially built a Mint for time. Our users were more than just individuals interested in upping their productivity, but also entire groups that wanted to manage their time as a team.

As we focused more energy on Charts, we decided we needed some more tactical products that our users could use daily. Hence, we opened up our suite of products beyond longer-term time management and created short-term hooks with Esper Ratings and Esper Agenda Check.

Esper Ratings on Slack

Esper Agenda Check on Slack

Check out a TechCrunch blog post on Esper.

In early 2014, I joined a small smart home startup called Leeo as a Product Manager leading our expansion into Enterprise Internet of Things (IOT). As the rest of our team worked on building and launching our first product, the Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight, a consumer, plug-and-play remote Smoke and Carbon Monoxide alarm monitor, I worked as a team with our co-founders to translate our company vision into our product suite, business, IP, and partnership strategy. In addition, I product managed our launch website, where I led the feature definition, information architecture, user experience design, content strategy, and vendor development and design partners.

My time at Leeo was a huge personal growth experience. Before Leeo, I had primarily worked as an Engineer and Designer. However, at Leeo, I played significant roles in Business Development, Partnerships, New Product Exploration, Product Marketing, and Strategy. I joined looking to work on high-level problems and expand my skills and experience. I am fortunate to say that got exactly that, beyond what I had even imagined.

As the sole employee out of our small team of twenty responsible for expanding from consumer to enterprise, I set the path for how to approach our growth. I began with a market survey of enterprise IOT and discussing our company vision with the Founders. Once I had a solid foundation of our goals, the market landscape in several enterprise IOT industries, and our existing partnership base, I selected a few high potential industries and dove into qualitative user research.

I interviewed 100+ individuals in the course of a few months to learn about various industries, different roles, and what their needs were in the IOT space. With our executive team’s wide-ranging contacts in Real Estate, we especially dove into all forms of that industry from Hospitality to Multifamily Residential Housing. This research spurred countless conversations with our leadership to determine company strategy for the coming months and years, resulting in numerous patents (see below).

What started as exploratory user research transformed into so much more as well. We began to form strong partnerships with individuals and companies who wanted not only to help us with our research but also to collaborate on projects with and even invest in us. For instance, after our meeting with one utility company about product collaborations, they invested and joined our board. Thus began my first experience leading Business Development and Partner Relationship Management, reporting directly to the Founding team.

As the value of my work shined, I was soon able to grow my team. I hired and managed a colleague, and together we accomplished deeper market landscape analysis and research. Our work served instrumental in securing investors down the line when asked for our due diligence.

As the only team member who had ever shipped a consumer electronic product before, I was also often tapped to give advice on hardware product design. It was an honor to leverage my strong hardware engineering experience to be a resource to the team as they navigated contract manufacturers in Asia and industrial designers in San Francisco.

Three months before we publically launched our first product, we were in need of a Web Product Manager who could reliably deliver in a short period of time. I took this opportunity to step up to product manage our launch website.

I led our teams through the feature definition, information architecture, user experience design, content strategy, and vendor development and design partners to ensure that we had a fully functional, responsive, product launch marketing page, e-commerce store, blog, support forum, and community forum to showcase our company and product in time for our mid October launch date.

This was yet another new growth opportunity for me. So far at Leeo, I had already had a significant impact in my roles in Business Development, Partnerships, and New Product Exploration. Now, I was offered another chance to play a leading role, this time in Software Product Management and Marketing, and I owned it. Our entire launch was seamless and it was rewarding to see how my work directly led to sales.

WO 2016040378 A3: Environmental monitoring devices and methods
US 20160071196 A1: Systems and methods for transferring data and revenue
US 20160072891 A1: Sensor-data sub-contracting during environmental monitoring
WO 2016007680 A1: Fault diagnosis based on connection monitoring
US 20160071219 A1: Dynamic insurance based on environmental monitoring
US 20160070614 A1: Identifying fault conditions in combinations of components
US 20160071184 A1: Service-improvements based on input-output analysis
US 20160071183 A1: Environmental monitoring device with event-driven service
US 20160071148 A1: Alert-driven dynamic sensor-data sub-contracting
US 20160070276 A1: Ecosystem with dynamically aggregated combinations of components
US 20160070920 A1: Constrained environmental monitoring based on data privileges

WO 2016032465 A1: Intuitive thermal user interface
US 9092060 B1: Intuitive thermal user interface
US 9304590 B2: Intuitive thermal user interface

WO 2016018269 A1: Electronic device having a programmed electrical characteristic
US 20160034010 A1: Electronic device having a programmed electrical characteristic

US 8967855 B1: Electronic device for determining external temperature
WO 2016028295 A1: Electronic device for determining external temperature

WO 2016032457 A1: Fluid-flow monitor
US 20160061640 A1: Fluid-flow monitor
US 20170038233 A1: Fluid-flow monitor

US 9213327 B1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 9372477 B2: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 20150268205 A1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 9170625 B1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
WO 2016010529 A1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 9116137 B1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 20160018799 A1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions

In the Fall of 2011, I had the opportunity to re-design and develop a new website for an Indian medical electronics startup. Along with a friend of mine, we conducted initial user and market research, designed the user experience and interface, created all graphic and visual design assets, and developed the website using HTML, CSS, and JQuery for a remote client half-way across the world in India. We both had full-time positions as Mechanical Engineers at the time and used our evenings and weekends to work on this project.

Every minute, two people in the world die from Anemia–a completely curable disease! One may think that perhaps the cure is not well distributed, but that is not the case. In fact, the weak link in the chain boils down to lack of accurate diagnosis. With a false positive diagnosis and treatment, dangerous complications occur. With a false negative diagnosis, no life-saving treatment is offered.

Biosense’s TouchHb product addresses this key moment in the chain by providing a reliable, portable, non-invasive diagnostic to healthcare workers. TouchHb targets mobile healthcare workers in rural India with its low cost and minimal profile.

Our client asked us to re-design the existing Biosense website so that it was easier to use and more engaging.

After determining that the website’s target audience would be the health care workers in the field and potential investors as opposed to the rural patients, my partner and I began with researching how to best design a site that could convince our target audience that TouchHb was a valuable product in which to invest.

We studied the history of anemia, key statistics, and existing solutions. We learned that though information was plentiful, it was not common knowledge and scattered.

We interviewed potential website viewers. With investors, we found that our biggest obstacle with was demonstrating the importance and need of TouchHb for people of the emerging world. Investors often did not realize the extent of the problem and how a solution was right at their fingertips. As we interviewed healthcare workers, we learned that many were entrenched in the mindset that reliable anemia diagnostics were only available at larger hospitals and had to invasively draw blood. We needed to make it clear that that was not the only option available to them. A portable and non-invasive solution could now be purchased by individuals at a fraction of the cost.

We researched how to best share our knowledge and achieve these goals, and came to the conclusion that our website needed to tell a story. From there, we began designing and prototyping what an immersive storytelling experience might be.

As we dove into the storytelling and user experience, we worked to simplify our story down to absolute essentials. A full-page, immersive slideshow analogy began to form as our chosen tool of expression. We strove to make our design friendly, engaging, informative, and a clear call to action. We wireframed various iterations out on the whiteboard as we cycled through this process.

Since my partner and I were both the designers and engineers on this website, we were careful to design a website that achieved all our goals independently from engineering challenges. After we were confident in the framework of our design, we determined what the best way to code our solution. Naturally, we faced some key engineering tradeoffs. For instance, we wanted to use a CMS, but realized that our schedule and resources would not allow us to complete the design we wanted with a CMS.

When we handed off the completed website design to our client, we provided them with all the final code, visual assets, and a
guide to the code.

On the visual design side, we followed a similar process of iterative design with colors, graphics, photography, and individual page layout. Throughout the process, we checked in with our client to make sure that they were satisfied with our progress and we tested our designs through interviews, usability tests, surveys, and A/B testing.

We settled on using a theme of warm colors that had earthly tones along with a red to subtly reference the blood associated with anemia.

Let’s dive into our process for the front landing page. Our process for all the other pages was extremely similar.

For the front page, we created initial wireframes of full-screen slideshows as well as framed sliders. We explored where we wanted information to be presented, and how we wanted to indicate how a user was to interact with and move through our story.

As we regularly checked in with our client, we created prototypes to share our progress. We started with simple static prototypes and gradually progressed into functional prototypes.

Once we were confident with the framework of our website, we began prototyping our visual assets. We had several photoshoots where we played with colors, framing, and composition. In our first photoshoot, we rented a nice lens and photographed ourselves in preparation for when we hired a model and on the off chance we did not need one. After looking through our shots, we needed a model.

In our second photoshoot, we hired a model and coached her through the session. We played around with various backgrounds, attire, facial expressions, positioning, subjects, lighting, and composition. At the end of our session, we had a massive library to chose from for our story.

After choosing our top images, we created rough static mockups of key pages side by side for feedback. We used side by side comparisons to determine our final combination of photographs.

If you would like to learn more about Biosense’s ToucHb, watch their TEDx talk: A 20 second blood test without bleeding from 2013.

Hewlett Packard acquired Palm soon after I joined in the summer of 2010. During my time at HP Palm, I was a member of the team that shipped the Palm Pre 2 and Palm Pre 3 phones. I learned and experienced a lot in my first year out of Stanford!

During my year and a half at Palm, I worked on the design of about ten smartphones. Some were products I jumped onto during the later stages of the development process and most were early concepts that we took through various stages of the development cycle.

Palm Pre 2 (shipped)
Palm Pre 3 (shipped)
Windsor Not (never released)

As a HP Palm Product Designer, I put my Product Design and Mechatronics degrees to good use. With teams of three to four Product Designers, we designed and developed entire smartphones from concept to shipping. Along with designing the overall system architecture and the detailed mechanical part design, I coordinated with and negotiated between various internal Palm Engineering, Marketing, and Industrial Design teams and external ODMs, vendors, and suppliers. During the product development process, I regularly analyzed and developed solutions for reliability and manufacturing failures.

While working on product development, I explored and prototyped concepts for future devices and physical interactions and experiences. I used market research and competitive analysis to inform my initial design directions. For instance, I primarily focused on what a dual screen experience might be as well as what a biometric (fingerprint sensor) experience could look like.

During this research, I realized that there was a huge need in the market for a candy-bar smartphone with a streamlined OS and what better system than webOS. In our downtime, my colleague and I began designing the concept for a new keyboardless phone. We pitched it to our team lead, manager, and within weeks our grassroots design gained traction from all over the company. Soon, our design was not only a product on the roadmap, but also the flagship product that had drummed up support, excitement, and hope from throughout the organization. We proceeded to develop our design through nearly the final stages of development. Though our product was canceled, I am extremely proud to have been a part of that experience.

From March 2010 to June 2010 as part of Stanford d.school‘s prestigious Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class, I worked with a diverse team of four, including Engineers and MBAs, to help rural Indonesian farmers earn fast cash from the weeds in their farms and simultaneously minimize deforestation.

With The Easy Steam Machine, rural Indonesian farmers can increase their income. The Machine provides them an efficient way to produce steam for their home essential oil distillation units. By reducing the time to produce steam from hours to just a few minutes, The Machine enables farmers to process at least 25% more biomass per day! Time is saved by (1) increasing surface area, (2) heat insulation, and (3) including a continuous water flow through system. As a $230 plug-and-play replacement for the traditional batch drum, the Easy Steam Machine ensures durable, hassle-free steam distillation.

The Easy Steam Machine speeds up the weak link in an existing system by two orders of magnitude. Using our boiler technology, we were able to reduce distillation time from 3 hours to 3 minutes!

Traditional Batch Drum Distiller

The Easy Steam Machine

We worked with IBEKA, our NGO partner in Indonesia, to identify the core need of these farmers. For one week, two of my teammates visited, observed, and interviewed these farmers in their fields. We noticed that these farmers were battling with lemongrass as a weed in their farms, and as a result, expanding into fresh rainforests as they struggled to keep their farms going so they could support their families.

Interestingly, most farmers had systems in place to convert their lemongrass into crude lemongrass oil, which they could easily sell for fast cash. However, these distillation systems were left unused, because it took them three hours of valuable time to boil the water necessary to begin the distillation process.

Subsistence farmers in Indonesia need a way to process all of their lemongrass and patchouli into higher value essential oil. Currently, farmers leave up to twenty-five and seventy-five percent of their plant material unprocessed because their essential oil distillation device is too cumbersome and time-intensive. Given the short harvest period and the low throughput of their device, farmers must leave potential income in the field, unprocessed.

In order to increase the quantity of oil output, we focused on increasing both the throughput and the yield, i.e. doing a faster job and doing a better job. The Easy Steam Machine is a replacement, plug-and-play device that fits directly into the traditional system — which makes it less expensive than purchasing an entirely new device. It also lowers the barriers to adoption because farmers will feel familiar with the design and user interface.

Inefficiencies with Traditional Distillation

The Easy Steam Machine

There are four problems with the existing system that lower throughput and yield: stifled fire, biomass heat loss, poor water-to-fire interface, and high water maintenance. We address each of these with our system by designing a more efficient fire, biomass insulation, higher surface area, and water flow-through.

The Easy Steam Machine speeds up the weak link in an existing system by two orders of magnitude. Using our boiler technology, we were able to reduce distillation time from 3 hours to 3 minutes!

Check out a prototype in action:

We handed this project over to our partner IBEKA to execute and distribute this among their served communities.

Read our implementation plan here.

Read our final presentation here.

Read more about the d.school class Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability here.

In the Summer of 2009, I moved to Beijing, China to work for Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) as a User Experience Design Researcher. I worked on a team of two Psychologists and two User Experience Designers/Researchers.

My time at MSRA was divided into two primary projects: Cross-Cultural Design Research and designing an Enterprise Social Networking Platform.

With our design research, we strove to understand how to design better digital experiences for a Chinese audience. Using qualitative and quantitative research methodologies and usability studies, we honed in on elements that resonated with our target audience. Specifically, we conducted market research and competitive analysis, surveys, interviews, A/B testing, card sorting, walkthroughs, task analysis, facilitated brainstorming, and participatory design.

We conducted much of our research with our Enterprise Social Networking Platform, the Twinkle Project, which in turn informed our design choices and directed our next iterations.

Social networks are a fantastic way to generate and share knowledge among large groups of people. Social software has the potential to build and maintain strong communication and collaboration channels. Yet, why do enterprise social software solutions still leave something to be desired?

There is a huge opportunity to apply social software within the Enterprise. The Twinkle Project explores exactly that. Could we redesign and reinvigorate Social Enterprise Software? How can we enable users to connect, collaborate, share content, knowledge, and expertise, manage information, and increase productivity across an enterprise?

As a designer for Twinkle, I was responsible for design research and strategy and UX and UI design.

A blurb about our work on Twinkle was featured in the 10 Year Anniversary MSRA Book (pg. 28).

Summer 2009, I moved to Munich, Germany to work as a User Experience Design Researcher at BMW Forschung und Technik (BMW Research and Technology). Our ConnectedDrive team was comprised of a diverse group of Computer Scientists, Psychologists, and Designers.

During my time at BMW, I was responsible for Cross-Cultural Design Research and the Design and Research for the Head Up Display, Dashboard, and Center Console On-Board Computer.

Our goal was to understand how aging societies and growing city size might affect our automotive infotainment design both within Germany and abroad. I researched and analyzed demographic data on aging societies, megacities, and their implication on the automobile and drivers. I also researched the latest findings on augmented reality and how we could apply them to the driver experience.

As the sole Design Strategist, I led the team through Design Thinking workshops and facilitated brainstorming sessions.

Using our cross-cultural design research as a foundation, we designed innovative interactions, UX, and UI for the Head Up Display, Dashboard, and Cluster Instrument Panel (entertainment and driver assistance functionalities). By conducting quantitative research and usability studies, our designs iteratively improved to achieve our priorities. Specifically, we conducted market research and competitive analysis, card sorting, walkthroughs, task analysis, and eye-tracking with 360 degree dynamic and static driving simulators.

Our user experience design research on Point of Interest selection was published and presented at the First International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI 2009) Sep 21-22 2009 in Essen, Germany.

Toggle Strategies for Point of Interest selection via the iDrive controller

Abstract: The importance of spatial and geo-based information has increased over the last few years. The most prevalent example of this kind of information is points of interest (POI) like hotels, restaurants, gas stations, etc. As cars are made for individual transportation, interacting with geo-based information via the In-vehicle Information System (IVIS) should be possible. At present, state-of-the-art IVIS only permit a list based or center based selection on the map, which makes it difficult to handle a high closeness of geo-based data. In this paper, we present alternative approaches for selecting geo-based data with a multifunctional controller. In our work, visual cues help users predict the selection order. An explorative user study showed potential advantages of our concepts.