FordPass & EV Features
ROLES: App Design / Experience Design / Product Design / QA Testing / UIUX
The FordPass app is designed to make your vehicle journey and experience with it easier by having a lot of controls and informative features for it right at your fingertips.
With electric vehicles on the rise, and a very competitive automotive market to keep up with, Ford is looking at the bigger picture on what they can do to make their FordPass app more than just a device on a smart phone that can remote start their car. How can they take advantage of the rising interest and demands of electric vehicles, and bring that market into smartphone devices and beyond where it’s not only informative for the owner, but also helps them become more aware of what they have to offer, and make more environmentally conscious decisions with their new vehicles while also helping them save money and expand the battery life of their BEVs?
Project One: Intelligent Charging
With the launch of Ford’s Mach-E and F-150 Lightning over the horizon, we knew that there would most likely be a lot of customers making the switch from gas cars to electric vehicles, and with that there will be a lot of unfamiliarity of what goes into owning and maintaining them. To help ease those who may be uncertain, Ford wanted to create a whole new set of features and functionality to their app to inform those new owners, help show them how easy it is to make the switch to electric, and also feature quality of life improvements for them with things like finding the best times to know when or where to charge their vehicle to save more money.
As one of the experience designers, and the lead UI for this product, I worked closely with a UX role, strategists, and team of developers to bring Intelligent Charging to life in FordPass. We started with asking the early questions about BEVs that a new owner might have, and looked into some scenarios of the customer journey and what many people who might be unfamiliar with an electric vehicle should know.
Our main focus with this product was figuring out how to not only make it as easy as possible to understand the owner’s new vehicle with onboarding them into being familiar with charging, but also to not overwhelm them with all of the new information they will be receiving.
We wanted to take a “don’t make me think” approach where with the help of crowd-sourced information like charging rates, accommodating to what the owner’s existing route/routine is, and the current locations of chargers: Intelligent Charging will eventually understand the owner’s routine and lead to automatically taking action by setting up recommended charging sessions for them.
This will help them with situations like “charging anxiety” by educating them on the proper ways to save money and keep their vehicle properly charged (without overdoing it). Eventually setting up charging plans with providers through the app, and having it evolve with the owners routine and lifestyle over time.
Project Two: Power My Trip
WIP copy: Intelligent Charging was off to a great start with helping new owners be onboarded in the electric vehicle lifestyle, but we didn’t want to stop there with introducing new features that would be beneficial to owners. Trip Planner is another product that will help plan longer road trips specifically for those with electric vehicles as well.
It’s as simple as opening the Trip Planner on your FordPass Map section, putting in your route, and seeing all the charging stations within your network along the way that are available. It will also add those charging times to your overall estimated destination ETA.
My focus here as the Experience Designer was to take what we currently already had planned out and built for the feature in FordPass’ dated 2.0 look, and bring it into their new 3.0 version while also adding newer features and capabilities into it’s functionality, and also making sure everything fit aesthetically and worked well on newer iphone and android screen sizes.
Our main goal overall was to get the owner from point A to point B as conveniently and affordable as possible, and help ease their anxieties of worrying where and when to charge their car along the way. We set up and explored different routes of 8+ hour trips, and looked into ways we could make it easy to add new destinations, change their charging locations (while seeing what was or was not in their preferred network), and then be able to upload from the app and sync that trip into their Navigation System in their Mach-E vehicle.
Project Three: Subscription Services
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