A revolutionary car Voice User Interface.

We were approached by a Fortune 500 car manufacturer’s UX design team in early summer 2018. They knew Punchcut is great at conducting design research, so they asked us to help them evolve their in-car digital assistant. They wanted us to find out what really matters to drivers around the world and complement their U.S. research.

Their challenge for us was to conduct qualitative research in 4 continents, and create a prototype based on our findings. This included visuals, animations and presenting our research over the course of 14 weeks.

My challenge was to conduct Regional Synthesis, find Insights and Opportunities, and inform our design decisions with these findings.

Some of my teammates went to Brazil, China, Germany and LA, while I stayed in San Francisco to read each interview transcript. I started by making a color key for the main topics that we wanted to highlight. Highlighting relevant quotes in each topic was crucial because we needed quotes to build Personas for User Journeys, which support our prototype’s design decisions.

I took all of the highlighted quotes and placed them in a Keynote file. These slides include organized quotes from earlier as well as their unique behaviors, present use cases and what each person desires from an in-car DA.

My team interviewed about 40 people, and we started to notice some trends in each group. Everyone had unique opinions but we were able to group their responses into 4 types. We can’t build Personas for each person -- because that’d be information overload for our visual/motion designers -- so we created Personas based off of each group.

Our clients already had a few Personas to work off of, but to complete our User Journeys we created storyboards based off of the 3 groups from our Affinity Map.

Each frame highlights a certain in-car digital assistant feature and encapsulates them in a cohesive narrative.

My work built a strong foundation for our clients and our design team. The Insights & Opportunities, User Profiles, Affinity Map and Storyboards informed most design decisions and may provide a great user experience for millions of future drivers.

Thanks for viewing!