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Toyota 2030
Toyota Woven Planet approached Left Field Labs for a unique partnership opportunity. Working together for three months we utilized research efforts from the Woven team to develop concepts for a new mobile app – titled "Toyota 2030." Together we built out a user narrative, user profiles, an all-encompassing app IA, user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and finally finished with a few UI concepts.
The goal was to create an app that fit the needs of a user at any given point of the ownership cycle, from pre-purchase and everyday use all the way through vehicle upgrade.
Agency
Left Field Labs
Role
Product Designer
The process
I sat on a team of three product designers, two researchers, and a creative director all reporting and presenting weekly to the Head of User Experience at Toyota Woven Planet. We worked in iterative sprints with the goal of discovering new features, plotting them out in the architecture of the app, creating wires and prototypes, testing them, and then presenting them to the team.
User personas
We were given a loose framework by Toyota on what they would like to see in terms of family size and ages, but it was important for our team to fill in the rest so that we could build out the user narrative.
Based on data from Toyota we settled on a small family of four who would be using their vehicle for everyday work, errands, childcare, etc. and would likely be upgrading their vehicle at some point.
User Narrative
With our personas laid out we turned our focus on the user narrative. The narrative was modified throughout the process, but the large bulk of it was developed by team members Parrish Hanna and Amber Podratz with the help of the Toyota research team. The story focused on the Townsends – a family of four looking for a new car. The journey followed the family through four core pillars of car ownership: Pre-Purchase, Just Bought, Owning & Operating, and End of Ownership.
Each pillar contains a piece of the overall story, with pivotal highlights tracked throughout. Additionally, each pillar contains a breakdown of the trends and research that influenced the narrative, and emotions the Townsend's may be feeling towards specific app functionality. This narrative was highly influential in developing and cataloguing new features to include in the mobile app and was important in presentations as a tool to drive emotional investment in the design decisions.
FEATURE LIST
The feature list was a balance between excitement for the future and technologies we'd want to see vs. current user expectations and features everyday users may expect or desire today. We made this list in the beginning along with the user narrative, and as we went along our team would add or subtract different ideas based on user feedback from the research team and our presentations with Toyota execs.
The Toyota team asked us to prioritize two types of features. Those that came up in user feedback often, and those that were covered by their OS – Arene. Features that were mandatory according to hundreds of user surveys were marked in blue on the list, and those that were covered by Arene were also prioritized and denoted. There was oftentimes overlap as the OS and its capabilities was the results of years of prior UX work.
RESEARCH FINDING
One of the big learnings for us came early on in the loop of feature concepts and user surveys. We learned quickly that while users were interested in features not currently available in other apps, they were mainly concerned with pre-existing features such as unlock/lock, climate control, etc. that made operating their vehicle easier for them. Because of this, more utilitarian features were prioritized in the feature list and highlighted in the wires later on.
Information Architecture
The IA was definitely a lengthy process. Leading with our feature list and user narrative, we worked with the Toyota research team iteratively to determine the optimal IA for the users to reduce any friction and really focus on shaping an intuitive experience. Card sorting in various user-testing programs drove a lot of the decision making in this segment.
A user could access the app without a vehicle in order to shop for one, so there needed to be two separate branches of the IA – one for vehicle owners and another for potential buyers / users who just wanted access to the app.
WIREFRAMES
After the IA, the bulk of our work was spent on wireframes. We started with laying out the basics and then went on to map out individual flows. The wires were utilized weekly in user-testing to gather feedback and presented at the end of each week as a way for us to present a visual to leadership on specific features. Below are the wires for a user safely transferring their data from their old car to their new vehicle.
Prototypes
The next step in the process was to take wires from various flows and turn them into clickable prototypes. These were once again utilized in user-testing to further test app navigation, feature awareness, app IA, etc. The results were immensely helpful in testing our own theories and providing proper validation when presenting to leadership.
One common fear that came up in user surveys was charge anxiety. A lot of people are interested in electric vehicles but many are worried about the charging experience, range, etc. One solve for this was the idea that the Toyota app would be cognizant of your travel, and could alert you if a charge was needed. From there a user could quickly find a charger on the way to their next destination, reserve it, and then the app would provide you with an updated route and departure time. Below is the flow for this experience.