Project Overview
Vehicle Upfitting. This is the process by which a vehicle is adapted or adjusted to suit the specific needs of the user. For example a construction worker may need shelving and designated spaces for their tools. A window washer will need a water tank and pumping system. The combinations are infinite.
One of the key goals of this project was not only to understand better how our larger fleet customers go about the procurement process for these bespoke vehicles, but to explore how a vehicle upfit interfaces with their internal systems from a digital and data perspective. The planned approach for this was to test an all encompassing service that looked after vehicle upfitting, fleet management and collected data from the upfits.
Skill Areas
Co-Creating With Stakeholders
A significant portion of this project involved working with the engineering and digital teams at Ford. Using their expertise, many potential pitfalls were avoided, and they were able to introduce us to expert industry users in the field.
As part of this collaboration, a big part of the output was to also introduce the wider stakeholder group to human centred design. This in turn also lead to us introducing them to a number of approahced and methods used to break down complex problems. One such example was the use of concept cards to comminucate ideas.
Inspiration from looking in
Following the co-creation phase, the design lead and myself then proceeded to recreate the exisiting fleet management product offering from across Ford within figma. This was a necessary step due to the unavailbility of an accessible design system.
The purpose of this was to allow us to have access to recreations of screens in the correct style that we could adjust and iterate upon. These would form the fleet management portions of the imagery used within the prototype.
Prototype Screens
Expert users, who held extensive knowledge of fleet vehicle management, were interviewed. The primary purpose was to improve our understanding of the procurement processes users experienced. This feedback was compiled into another project output, the fleet procurement user journey map.
Given the constraints of remote interviews during the Covid lockdown period, a series of simple screens were created to ensure smooth and easy testing of a website experience. These were shared with users to communicate a new prototype experience. This experience aimed to bring together the physical upfits of a vehicle which they may be familiar with, with additional digital and data enhancements.