ENABLING OWNERS TO INITIATE CHARGES AND GAIN CHARGING INSIGHT WITH THE RIVIAN APP
GO-TO MARKET / MARKET RESEARCH / CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT / WIREFRAMES / UX DESIGN / USABILITY TESTING
PROJECT DETAILS
Rivian / UX Designer / Contract Project / 3 Designers Total / 6 Months / Year 2021
PROJECT ASK
Develop a Go-To Market mobile charging experience as new rivian owners accept the first Rivian R1.
ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITES
Leading reviews, delivering ux designs, delivering prototypes, supporting with usability testing, collaborating endlessly with our product & engineering partners. Teamed with Visual Designer and Design Lead/ACD
00 / OVERVIEW
BUSINESS PROBLEM
Rivian was months away from launching the first R1, but our new owners still had no access, insight or control of the vehicles status away from the vehicle
PROJECT GOAL
Our goal was to develop a foundational yet insightful mobile charging experience that supported early adopters
01 / USER RESEARCH
Our objective with this initial round of research was to gain a pov from experts, understand what current ev owners wish they knew and also what new ev owners were still uncertain about.
INSIGHTS
With new lifestyles comes different behaviours.
Charging is as core to vehicle itself and it’s just a different lifestyle. There’s a foundational experience we need to deliver.
There is also a key behvaioural difference between home charging vs on the road.
Home charging is all routine, if you plug it in at night you’ll be ready by the morning. If you’re on the road or taking long trips you typically need to plan and check for chargers and also check for speeds as an ideal session is 20-30min.
There’s alot to learn—customers were anxious about the unknown
Non ev owners had so many questions…there’s a steep learning curve and it’s intimidating. They’re are anxious about the basics of charging, how the heck energy works, cost and the time drained from your daily life.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
Make charging feel effortless & less intimidating for new owners.
We need to instill early confidence and make charging at home/away feel effortless & less scary as new EV owners embark this different lifestyle.
02 / IDEATION AND CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
Our key focus was to identify areas where we can help our owners be prepared and one step ahead in hope to instill confidence and comfort as they entered EV ownership.
CONCEPTS
Location based, set a routine, plan your adventure, and 101’s
We wanted something that was first contextual based on location, which helped catered to the different needs like I just want to see if my local charger is available or is my schedule set/ready for at my night time charge versus I need a Fast Electrify America station near me & now.
We added session analytics to see when your time charging is no longer optimal, and 101 cards for micro learning to break the learning curve on step at a time.
Let’s align. High impact-medium effort
The goal with this concept was to find something that felt capable with our product owners and something that gave our owners the most confidence. We identified our goal for launch was enable users to identify a good charger and gain realistic session expectations to make optimal decisions☺
KEY FOCUS
Enable users to identify a good charger and gain realistic session expectations to make optimal decisions☺
We knew owners felt the least confident locating chargers and during a charging session because they felt in the dark about the abundance & reliabilty of chargers and performance of an average charging session at home and away.
SOME VALIDATION
We love speed & Electrify America
While pressure testing some of these features we learned that current EV Owners have their preferred network and owners want to be able to identify fast chargers & session efficiency more than anything.
Certain networks operate and are maintained more than others.
Networks have their own rates, memberships & operational guidelines
Higher kW speeds are typically preferred (especially when inconvenient)
APPROACH
Charging foundations then adventure
Our team aligned on feature sets that were foundational to owning an EV and agreed on holding off features like smart/connected home, home routines and plan my adventure as larger initiatives that will be kicked off post launch.
03 / UX DESIGN
Our approach as we went into detailed designs was to design and build at the same time and then test the build, as all functions were literally “sprinting” towards launch AKA day of delivery.
DESIGN DECISIONS
Enable owners to quickly authorize a charging network once they navigated to the site
We landed with the hyper-foced ux show casing the nearest site as most users would come to the app post navigating with their vehicle with the need to initiate a session, but they would also have the ability to keep exploring as the secondary case.
Allow owners to make key decisions during a charging session
Viewing the state of charge was the key datapoint that most owners looked for, but we learned (and most new owners won’t know) is that most sessions tend to slow down past 80% a.k.a. if you don’t need to be at 100% you’re wasting precious time.
We landed with a solution that displayed the energy graph along with session insights as users could visibly see that their session has “dropped” and is no longer optimal. We had this as an overlay as not everyone needs to know the ins and outs of their session, but its key to help you make the decision to unplug or stay when something isn’t right.
TEAM REVIEWS
Let’s make sure we’ve got no gaps
We had many.. many reviews and many..many flows ensuring there were no technological gaps as we delivered.
TESTING
Some flows could be shorter, let’s do some backend magic
During our live tests participants felt that the steps to start the session still felt too long and so we explored technical options to mitigate the time & steps. But other flows we’re very intuitive i.e setting up the charger.
04 / FINAL DESIGN
I’ll be honest, I think towards the end of this project we didn’t have enough time to explore the UI interactions & components we wanted to, but we stuck to the bones and were still able to deliver some cool features
OUTPUTS
What’s my stat?
Owners got full visibility of their charging status during their charging session
7 networks through one app
Owners were able to link accounts to gain access to an array of charging networks. Start, pay and charge through the Rivian App.
Good chargers near
Through user and vehicle location, owners were able to quickly view the closest charging station to them.
Let’s getouttahere
Owners had all the insight they needed to unplug or continue charging.
Ready to update
Owners could add Rivian products to their account and get updates when new software updates were released
05 / OUTCOME
By the time the first Rivian owner received their vehicle, they had the ability to gain insight on anything to do with their vehicle’s charge right at their fingertips, wherever they went.
THE NOT SO PRETTY SIDE
The biggest challenge in this project was developing a final product while we were also discovering our digital brand identity and global DSL. I wouldn’t say this was a challenge we overcame right away, but this spearheaded a strong initiative to start new cross-collaboration, project processes and established the urgency to create a unified brand and design system across the vehicle, app, website and internal tools.