Fusing User Experience and Ecosystem Thinking

In 1955, people went to Disneyland for thrill rides and mouse ears. Now, people go to Disney for a totally immersed, personalized experience designed to efficiently shuttle visitors through interactive environments.

Expectations are changing for everything and that includes transportation. Rather than being a means to get from point A to point B, it now is an experience for the user. Things happen automatically, requiring less thinking and work for the end user while increasing efficiency and safety.

Some people say this new “smart world” will discourage people from thinking for themselves; others say we will evolve by learning new, more advanced skills. Imagine asking a 16-year-old to plan a trip without a smartphone. It’s just not going to happen. But, conversely, teens are faster than adults at learning new features.

User experience can be defined as the overall experience a person has when interacting with a product or environment. It’s all about designing the overall, end-to-end experience for the end user. Current vehicles have instrument-panel displays for vehicle speed, engine rpms and lots of other information. Autonomous vehicles don’t need them. This opens up the vehicle landscape to an interactive display of general information such as car health, navigation and social connections.

In the past, homes, cars, purses and shoes were thought of as independent systems. We now are experiencing an evolution of systems fusing together into ecosystems. No longer is designing a car about the driver. Now, it’s about the “user” who can be defined as the driver, the person on the sidewalk or the person driving the car next to them. The car needs to interact with all these things.

Consumers today expect dynamic and connected experiences. Product and place designers need to think of systems as “user moments” or “groups of moments” connecting to form an ecosystem. Likewise, companies need to evolve from segmented practices and functional acceptance criteria to an interdisciplinary environment with user-experience metrics.

Historically, in the automotive sector, designers have applied a Systems Thinking model. Components such as the transmission are systems that work together to form the vehicle, which also can be thought of as an ecosystem.

To personalize an experience in a vehicle, one must consider the pre-ride, during-ride and post-ride experience by connecting the dots from the person’s life to tailor it to exactly what they need. Before diving into product development, user-experience designers should identify the Moments that Matter for the end user. 

From an engineering standpoint, it is similar to using the Lumped System Parameter model which takes moments or groups of moments that are identified as a system with a common joint to another system for a cohesive design.

The sector most focused on user-centered design today is software development. Over the past decade, the industry has done a 180-degree turn, eschewing detailed functional requirements that describe what a system should look like and what it should do, in favor of a suite of UX artifacts such as personas, scenarios, user stories, user journey maps, and more, that describe how a system should make the user feel, the emotional reaction the user should experience and the kind of satisfaction users should feel because their desires are being met.

The software space is fiercely competitive. New leaders seemingly are born overnight, and user-centered designs mixed with the iterative, quality-focused practices collectively known as “agile” are at the center of it all. As mechanical engineers are designing physical systems that humans interact with in the real world, they must seize the user-centered approach and make it their own.

The automobile is evolving into a computer on wheels, which will require companies to produce zero-defect code very quickly. Long gone are the days of three-year development cycles. Today, it happens in one-week sprints and three-month development phases. Automotive manufacturers are not set up for this approach, but software companies are ready – and doing it. 

Front-loading the product-development process with UX research and design calls for a change in the way we work together within the corporate arena. The product has to look good and be functional. The process of identifying and creating the right experience includes human cognitive theory, art, engineering, marketing, data analytics, software development and more.  Most companies are not designed for high-quality, interdisciplinary work.

We are at an important inflection point today, where universal Internet access, cheap distributed computing and inexpensive low-power sensors are colliding to create a world of connected devices, and an ambient intelligence across machines in the physical world we inhabit. Engineers, scientists, designers, artists and others must work as a team, immersing themselves in customers’ lives before diving deep into features and functions.

We no longer design products. We design experiences in the world, interconnected and powered by digital technology. Whether it’s driving, shopping, playing or communicating, they are digital experiences, one and all.

Kimberly Clavin is a Mechanical Engineer at Pillar Technology, a leading producer of integrated digital experiences for the automotive, industrial, agricultural and other industries.  Within Pillar she is leading a product-development team for Loop, a solution to accelerate embedded-systems development.  https://loopbypillar.com Twitter: @clavinator, @loopbypillar