Leading the definition of a whitespace small utility vehicle program.
For this project, I led a D-Ford human-centered design team to define the design strategy for a whitespace, small utility vehicle program, a fun challenge after I had just worked on the opposite-sized side of Ford’s showroom!
I started the team off doing desktop research to identify key questions we had for the preliminary ethnographic research on the customer for this vehicle.
Collaborating closely with the marketing team, I then structured and jointly led a series of workshops to distill from the ethnography the personal priorities of our target demographic. These workshops went really well, and our team had a great time collaborating with the marketing team integrating our latest ethnographic research with key broader corporate studies, ultimately arriving at high-quality initial customer priorities.
With the team, we then designed and I moderated a series of workshops to guide a broader cross-functional group (our D-Ford team, Marketing, and Engineering) to uncover essential themes and insights from our customer knowledge, and to ideate key priority experiences we suspected would be important to deliver on the product.
A personal highlight from leading this program’s design strategy was our unconventional final workshop. One of the D-Ford team members suggested to have participants use images as their primary means of expression in the workshop, and we all thought it was a great idea! After we synthesized this workshop’s output, it was clear this approach yielded some really creative problem-solving from the cross-functional team, clearly illustrating diverse solutions that hadn’t yet come up to deliver desirable experiences to the customer.
From this workshop content, I led our team to prepare for our main customer research phase, working together to find our open questions for the research discussion guide. With these questions, we were able to note key tensions, and I divided these up amongst us to prep six sacrificial conceptual journey storyboards to show customers in research. These expressed the diverging directions we could take the experience strategy, probing for deeper human insights from their reactions.
We received clear signals from our research and identified the core attributes of the design strategy for the program, along with many additional valuable insights, such as what NOT to do. I presented the design strategy research to senior leadership with the team to a great reception, with many follow-up questions on how to approach each our experience pillars.
The program was deprioritized before we had a chance to concretely define executions of the key experiences and take them back to customer research, but the strategy we defined moved directly onto another major vehicle program in development. Despite the early end to the program, I’m very proud of the work my team produced: high-quality human insights, and a strongly defined experience strategy.