Cadillac Navigation System

38 inch curved screen for 2021 Escalade

Review of the intierial

"-Cadillac Escalades are known for being big vehicles, and the 2021 version will apparently get a screen to match.-"

My Role

Lead design from beginning to end
Manage a team of 3 designers
Work with the team to deliver visual
Work with the research team to iterate based on users' feedbacks
Work with PM, PJM, Dev, QA to deliver the final product
Worked directly with GM internal stakeholders
Debated and proposed innovative UX solutions
Designed new documentation formats for better collaboration and understanding

Personas

The research team offered the following personas, after some survey and user interviews. I joined most of the user interviews.

Supermom: 34, Beauty Salon Owner, 4 kids

Hipster: 40, Recording Studio owner, single

Nearly Retired: 60, Construction CEO, single

I referred to them throughout the entire product development process.

Features

GM offered a requirement file, listing all the features they want. I went through the list, worked with PM to offer the following feedback:

Design vs Feature: e.g. "Need to have a direction arrow for each search result" vs "Need to help users understand the direction of each search result".

De-scope: I believe that for having a feature, we need a better reason than "It won't hurt", "We always have this" or "All others are doing it".

By going through and polishing the requirements, we had not only freed up more room for designing but also understood better for users' goals.

Set Direction

linked wireframes as happy path

Happy Path

After we had agreed on the scope of features, I began to think of some happy paths. The reason I did this first, is to focus on the key features, without spending too much attention on the frictions of user experience.

I reviewed and iterated on 3 different paths I came up, with the team until the whole team has the same vision.

The happy path whole team agreed on had about 20 screens, and the final design document had included more than 300 screens.

prototype for testing the happy path

Clinic

I worked with the research team and customers to test the happy path with our target users.

The goal is to prove the mental modal in the happy path, does offer an intuitive and enjoyable user experience.

Deliver Details

review process including the customers

Process

It was really important to build trust with the internal stakeholders at GM so we would have the opportunity to push the limit on the design and interaction. I helped develop and implement a formal review process that enabled different audiences to participate and review the different stages of the design.

Below are some key points this process took care of:

Transparency: Try to include the team into the design process, meaning brainstorm together, show design as early as possible.

Different audience: PM needs to understand the flow fast, dev needs to cover most of the logical cases, QA needs to know what had been changed.

slanted screen

Unique Challenge

Laying out navigation on a system that used slant and a curved right edge was challenging and I needed to invent and test new UI patterns like word predictions in the search box.