Experience & Interaction Design

Over-the-Air Updates

Vehicles today are expected to act like your cell phone. Ford has been vigorously looking into making a user's vehicle still seem fresh and new throughout the ownership life cycle. My role on this feature was to help understand the customer journey and pain points of updating their vehicle across multiple interaction channels. The following is a brief overview of one particular use case to update a Ford or Lincoln vehicle.

Design Principals

Maintain the “new car smell” throughout the ten-year life cycle of the vehicle by continuously providing new features and fixes.

Access to the update progress is available from any time, place, or channel; allowing for a seamless experience

Earn customer trust by being respectful of the user’s time, effort, and attention.

Leveraging community content before and after updates to enable confident OTA decision-making

Process & Deliverables

Analyze current experience and identify pain points
Storyboards of ideal experience of typical use cases
User flows/wireframes
Interactive Prototypes

Update Process

Notification

Vehicle users get a notification when a new update is available.

Download

When connected to a data source, wi-fi or cellular, the requested update is downloaded in the background

Install

Once ready, the vehicle notifies the user to schedule their update installation if the vehicle needs to be inhibited or automatically applies the update if it doesn’t.

Boot

After the install is complete the update is ready to be applied on the next key cycle for the vehicle. This is when the user will be notified what has changed.

Personas

Amy - The truster

Keeps automatic updates ON

“I prefer the automatic updates that happen at night. It makes updating not a hassle. Updates can take while...

I just like to do it when I’m asleep and don’t have to think about it.”

Tom - The Overseer

Keeps automatic updates OFF

“I turned off my auto-update. I like to control when I do it. There needs to be enough battery and usually takes 10-15 minutes.”

He wants to update his car on his terms, but still doesn’t want to be bombarded with notifications.

Storyboards