Demonstrating a seamless ecosystem experience.
My first major prototyping project at D-Ford, the human-centered design team at Ford, was an exploration in enhancing user experience within Ford's services, drawing inspiration from other cohesive ecosystems in tech, such as that found in Apple's 'walled garden'. Our goal was to demonstrate the potential of seamless interaction and personalization across different platforms to senior leadership at an internal technology showcase event.
For this project, I transformed the interaction design team's initial interface wireframe and rough user flow into a fully-defined functional prototype and system architecture. I led both our prototyping team and an external supplier group to bring this vision to life.
My hands-on work involved crafting the UI and animations in Unity, coding in Java for Android to connect with the Sync 3 infotainment system via Applink, and revamping our socket networking code into Java for smoothly integrating the prototype system together. With the system architecture and messaging paradigm for the network interop planned in advance, these components integrated easily with vehicle-interfacing modules provided by the supplier.
While I was onsite to assist in case of trouble, the prototype demo ran smoothly during our presentations to senior leadership at the internal showcase event. The demo was top-rated by the senior management that came to see it, spurring great conversation on how to leverage the approaches we showed to enhance the overall experience of owning Ford products.