MY ROLE
Visual Design
UI Design
TIME
March 2018 - July 2018
PROJECT
Car, App, Road Sign, Inner Display Panel etc.
The chanllenge: Design an unique interactive self-driving car and related services
Self-driving cars are not strangers as a lot of companies have released their cars on the road tests. Drive.ai was facing a challenge: design an unique car that stands out from the other self-driving cars and amaze the world. The car was going to launch in two months, followed the taxi service, so the schedule was pretty intensive. In this three months, we designed the car, the mobile App for self-driving taxi service, the road sign indicating the route of the car, the display panel inside the car for passengers and some related market materials.
I'm going to showcase my work with a few case studies here.
Orange is the new black
The skin of the car would firstly catch people's eyeballs, so we put lots of efforts in this part. Recent years, self-driving car industry has thrived and a lot of classy, minimal designs of self-driving car can be seen on the road.
Most self-driving cars are covered by white or black skins, which look elegant and steady. They have fitted very well in a great self-driving car population. But the first big challenge I met was to design something different and unique among the large force of self-driving cars.
Since it was an interactive self-driving car, it should catch people's attentions at the first glance. People would feel safe when they were facing a self-driving car that looked similar with an ordinary car. However, people would also not be scared when an obvious and interactive self-driving car passed by, because people could know whether the car had detected them or not. The obvious and interactive outlook is playing a very important role especially under the situation that the technology is still being developed and self-driving car accidents have happened several times.
AARP even recently deemed orange the “hottest car color of 2018”.
According to the report, White (23 percent), black (19 percent), gray (17 percent), and silver (15 percent) are the most popular colors of cars. Orange took smaller market place before. However more people have chosen orange since 2018, which makes orange to be “hottest car color of 2018”. For me, this is a very good news, besides it's a relatively unique color that many people love. The orange color could potentially be able to lead the cars' fashion.
See? you can identify the orange car among a large number of cars. Another thing makes it obvious is that orange is an opposite color of blue which is drive.ai's brand color. Orange is also the color of safety road sign.
Self-driving car App
After Launching the car, we started to design the related taxi services. In order to design a seamless experience for riders, we followed these two guidelines:
1. The experience should accord with their familiar process of calling a taxi with App.
2. The experience to take the ride after the self-driving car is arrived should be brand new.
Cooperating with the principle user experience designer and prioritizing the needs with the stakeholders, we created low-fidelity prototypes in Axure to show the flows of the main functions. We collected usability feedback from potential users and iterated the prototype several times. We aimed to provide riders with a consistent visual experience of the car and the app, as well as to improve the company's brand awareness. By working with engineers, we got our initial deliverable.
There are more...
To provide riders a completed experience of the self-driving car, we designed an inside panel for them to check the status of the car, as well as the road sign to keep other drivers noticing the route of the self-driving cars.
Drive.ai in exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Here's a video showing the experience of the self-driving car service