Redefining a decade old corporate process
Nissan sought expertise to revolutionize their In-Vehicle HMI Design creation process. The mission involved updating their design process with modern 2D and 3D tools, adopting a comprehensive pipeline strategy, and implementing a state-of-the-art design library framework to drive efficiency and effectiveness. It capped off with a vision concept of their future product.
— PROJECT NAME
"Smashed Merc"
— ROLE
Team Leadership
Creative Direction
Design Critique
Org Design
Pipeline + Tools Dev
Business Design
User Experience
2D, 3D + Motion
Project Management
CEO + C-Suite Presentations
Cross-Functional Collaboration
— DATE
Apr – Jul 2023
Provided HMI review of the Nissan Ariya, consult on industry best practices, compare design tools. Champion design system and component based design work with prototyping capability. Built out a dynamic pipeline that considers an omni-channel digital focus. Provide insights on gap to market and design recommendations for a vision of their potential next generation portfolio utilizing this pipeline.
- - Exponentially reduced time to market
- - Introduced new organizational structure to promote customer first digital experiences
- - Roll out toolset training
- - Support next generation systems design and development
- - Introduced new partnerships to modernize practices
Brand, market + HMI analysis
Existing tools in use
Excel was the largest tool currently used in their existing process with some tables containing thousands upon thousands of referenced files with all wireframes, features, product references, annotations, software notes, documentation and calibrations all completed in Excel.
Design tool analysis
Process + pipeline improvement in action
Figma was selected for a more modern, collaborative and performant design tool solution, the perfect choice to set up a design system with your designs. Here are some samples of some of the Nissan Ariya Photoshop design assets recreated in Figma and turned into an organized library structure leveraging masters and variants and components and organized into a new design system ready export structure.
Zeroheight was selected for its seamless connectivity with Figma as the design system solution. Here are some samples of some of the Nissan Ariya design assets turned into components and organized into a new design system structure.
QT was chosen as the prototyping and software environment due to its wide flexibility, its performance emulating and hardware balancing and also thanks to its plugin support with Figma. Its Figma support essentially allows one click prototyping export and one click automated export to a software ready environment. Part of the Nissan team request was putting the existing Nissan Ariya design assets through this new pipeline to show A/B comparisons of the real process and pipeline improvements and the above videos show working software demonstrated.
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Nissan requested expert guidance on looking into their future, after considering their branding, market positioning, competitive benchmarks, their existing tools and pipelines and where we had just suggested they pivot to; they wanted us to put all of that to use in crafting a vision for a new designed future product portfolio.
Nissans benchmark was that it currently takes them 6 months to do one screen, we wanted to cut it down to 6 weeks. We were using a smarter pipeline and now we wanted their interface to be smarter, more contextual and more aware of its user. These board vignettes encompass some of our team brainstorming and ideating activities where we used our Nissan Ariya analysis as a foundation to inform what features should be prioritized or removed entirely, what experiences needed to be focused on and what the flow would be. We looked at display shapes, sizes and how that would work into their portfolio high to low even including their upscale brand Infiniti.
These were our established design pillars for the vision work, they were in fact used for the Ariya industrial design and exterior design form language but we saw a missed opportunity to extend its metaphorical inspiration to the digital user experience as well.
Primary visual inspiration for the new visual design language of Nissan’s digital user experience vision.
Primary visual inspiration for the new visual design language of Nissan’s digital user experience vision.
Primary visual inspiration for the new visual design language of Nissan’s digital user experience vision.
Primary visual inspiration for the new visual design language of Nissan’s digital user experience vision.
Primary visual inspiration for the new visual design language of Nissan’s digital user experience vision.
This encapsulates some of our process identifying where we wanted the brand to move as a result of this new user experience, how the style needed to shift, as well as a parallel company to target, whenever we were in doubt where Nissan should go with this design we could lean on that brand parallel as an aspirational and relevant target to strive towards.
Display size and orientation ideation
Display Tier Use + Rollout Strategy
Voting on thematic direction
Chosen mainstream theme
2x primary instrument cluster layouts available in addition to a calm focus mode and the peek in charging screen.
Numerous touch screen display images show off a taste of future functionality, intelligent suggestions, software updates, theming customization, EV charging experience and customizable widgets.
A taste of the passenger experience where they can have their own entertainment oasis, a must for high end lux competition.
Here we see fully interactive prototypes, with software ready code, feature functionality, modality and even realtime 3D incorporated into the deliverables, including Figma files and QT ready environment files.