<aside> ☝🏻 Fun Fact: While in Florida on a client site visit, my hotel parking lot was invaded by wild hogs. 😲

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Both of the projects that I worked on with Ford are under NDA’s at the moment, so while I can’t share exact details of the work, I’ve written a bit about key activities and learnings from my time working on them.

🤔 Things I learned

• How to feel more comfortable asking follow up questions during in-person research or observations
• Not all dealers are trying to just rip you off 😂 - while I haven’t been a car owner for too long, you always hear those stories about dealerships being overpriced and ripping people off, but I was positively surprised at the level of care and attention the service managers and advisors had towards their customers.

🔑 Key activities

• User Research
  • Full-workday on-site shadowing and interviews with service managers and advisors
• User Testing - moderation, note-taking, and research synthesis
  • 3 sets of remote testing sessions (1 with service reservation staff across the country, 2 with target users)
• Low, medium, and high fidelity wireframing
  • Iterating based on client feedback and collaborating with visual design and content strategy teams

🌟 My Project Highlights

• All the moving pieces (service reservations project) - this was probably the most involved service design project I’ve worked on, and I really enjoyed seeing the process of how a customer-facing app, a service advisor reservation software, and all the interactions in between came together to produce a full service.
• In-person observation and research - while remote research and user testing is definitely cheaper and easier, I really enjoyed getting to visit three dealers in person. It gave me an opportunity to witness the entire system and experience in action and gave me so much context regarding programs we had been seeing over Zoom for weeks. I was able to take those learnings and help the rest of the design team better contextualize their designs and understand how dealers would likely interact with the product we were building.

Want to see projects with a bit more process work that I can share? Check out like projects this financial one or this retail one!