Concept
Development

Project Description

Release date: 2021
Role: UI/UX Designer

Creating a holistic system is to map out all the needed features used throughout the system. Each component needs to be conceptualized in layout, hierarchy, and user experience, making sure that the driver has easy access to all the available information they need to do their job.

The Challenge

As development continued throughout the project, smaller parts of the interface needed to be changed to accommodate changes requests and limitations discovered throughout development. New concepts had to be created from scratch using the existing style guide and layout to preserve consistency, and existing concepts needed to be modified.

The Process

I first gathered the related information relevant to the project to work with a new concept. With big companies, the information gathering process can be very tedious as there are many various departments that hold that information, and you do not always know who and which department is responsible for what part. Otherwise, the risk of working in the wrong direction is too high. To start somewhere, I found existing specifications that would support the concept cohesion with the rest of the system. I also made a list of requirements from my perspective and worked out what information I would need from which department. With the list of requirements either validated, adjusted, or corrected to the information given to me, I started to work on the concept.

The first step was to map out all the states the concept would have, what elements that specific state would have, and how they interacted. I would then create a wireframe layout mapped with the elements. At this moment in time, it is important to mention that there was no design system available to speed up the screen design process and that the work tool was mainly relying on the Adobe Suite for content creation. With the preliminary work done, I would create a more high-fidelity version of the various states that could be used as a baseline for the concept discussions.

I inserted the "worst-case scenario" dummy element in all the screens used as a discussion foundation to minimize the number of changes. I quickly found out that most discussions seemingly always were based on "best-case" expectation which unsurprisingly would lead to a myriad of changes, both big and small, that would lead to a lot of overhead in changing the layout and elements to accommodate these scenarios.