Centralizing Vehicle Software Development at Daimler Truck
TechDex - a tool managing whole vehicle software lifecycles and documentation, enabling digital twins and flash over the air.
Duration
Role
Type
July 2023 - Present
Intern -> Lead UX Researcher -> Designer II -> UX Lead (current)
Industry Project
Project Brief
Problem: Daimler Truck, built its legacy with hardware, but today is a software-defined world. The OEM's vehicle development process, falls behind in supporting software, resulting in mammoth sized resource loss, consistently late deadlines, siloed teams, and duplicate work.
Goal: By centralizing vehicle software documentation, we automate documentation, streamline development, and bring together disparate parts of the design process. Additionally, our work enables innovation like flash-over-the-air and the foundations for digital twins.
This case study covers research and design of user research artifacts (personas and journey maps), UI prototypes, and stakeholder onboarding material.
Note: Information on this case study is limited due to company policies. Please ask me for more details!
Strategy
Outline of select project phases to this date
1
Discovery Phase: Defining the problem, journey maps & personas
2
Project Awareness: Stakeholder outreach and spreading awareness
3
UI Design: The tool’s user interface
4
Achievements (thus far): Outcomes & Learnings
Journey Maps & Personas
Discovery Phase
Research Method: In-depth user interviews
Participants: 40 engineers, 80+ interview sessions. We landed on this sample size because it reached our resources, availability of participants and time was limited.
Results: An illustration of the entire Feature (function in truck) Development Process - a task attempted before, but never accomplished. My report included 20 journeys and 19 role-based personas.
Above are a few components of the interactive journey map. Shows the landing page map and an example of one of the maps embedded in the overarching journey. Demo available upon request.
Examples of the personas in the collection that resulted from my research. The personas were a design task itself, undergoing several iterations that are not shown.
Project Awareness
Stakeholder Outreach And Spreading Project Awareness
As an infant team, our mission and product was unknown within the company. Even as we set out to spread the word, users struggled to understand TechDex's goal. This was due to the extreme siloing of processes and teams.
As a way to promote the project and educate employees on the problems that we found in our research, I created several resources - repurposing the personas into a poster format to be hung around the office, blog posts for the internal company webpage, and delivering pitch presentations.
Personas posted in one area of the campus.
An attention-grabbing comic strip introducing TechDex (formerly EEDoc).
UI Design
TechDex’s User Interface
Images below are screen grabs of the prototypes developed for the tool. The designs were done collaboratively with two other designers on my team.
See videos of the prototype embedded in an onboarding deck used to introduce the internal tool to engineers.
UI prototypes made in Figma.
Example of a UI flow I designed in Figma.
Video: User onboarding/introduction to tool deck.
Outcomes
The personas posters lead to several inquiries about the tool and my work. One of these inquiries led to a personal request for my collaboration on two projects with the Director of Engineering of Autonomous. Another inquiry led to our first external department sponsorship of $350,000.
My research drove product strategy and is still used today to onboard new team members and stakeholders.
By request, the persona design was made into a template for other teams’ use.
Learnings
Perfectionism hinders progress. When I published the designs I was not happy with them and planned to redo them entirely. But to this day, I get inquiries about my work and requests implement similar designs for other needs.
Data collection, organization, and retrieval is a large and wide spanning design challenge!