Envisioning The Future of Content in Ford Autonomous Vehicles

Background

As Ford races towards manufacturing fully autonomous vehicles (AV), their AV Content Strategy team at the Ford Greenfield Labs Innovation Center needed some additional “fuel” to envision what the future of content in an AV could be, and needed help messaging that across Ford organizations to bring partnerships and programs to life.

Goal

Re-imagine what life could look like in a Level 5, fully autonomous world, in regards to in-vehicle content and experience within the following program verticles:

  • Advertising
  • Shopping
  • Entertainment
  • Productivity

Support the Content Strategy team in communicating their vision to partners and through corporate events.

Role

I was the Design Lead on this project. My responsibilities included:

  • Facilitating vision and ideation workshops with clients and partners
  • Market research
  • Journey mapping
  • User flows
  • Mid-fidelity mock-ups
  • Prototyping
  • Creating communication materials
  • Exhibit design

Team

I worked very closely with 2 Program Managers who carried the vision of their respective programs across Ford.

AV Personas

Leveraging data from a large-scale demographic AV study conducted by Ford, I created these proto-personas to help us imagine how autonomous vehicles could benefit each of them in their daily lives.

Advertising

Without drivers having to focus on driving the vehicle anymore, how could Ford take advantage of driver downtime in different AV vehicle use cases to advertise useful offers to the rider?

Some questions I applied to the above personas helped the Ford team explore opportunities for the future:

  • What would motivate a rider to actually take advantage of the advertisement or offer?
  • How can we geographically locate relevant businesses to advertise, using the AV’s GPS system?
  • How do we leverage user data to inform advertisements, without violating privacy laws?
  • What is the balance between useful and bombarding advertising?

We answered these questions through flow charts, journey mapping, mock-ups, and prototypes to vet advertising technology partners. We also expanded our thinking from advertising to consider the user’s holistic journey which included the other verticles of Shopping, Entertainment, and Productivity.

Shopping

Advertising feasibly flowed right into in-vehicle shopping in the autonomous future. This vertical aimed to answer questions such as:

  • What kind of experience are current competitors offering as far as in-car shopping?
  • What types of products can be relevantly offered for in-car shopping?
  • How can we integrate with existing Ford mobile apps?
  • What steps can we take today in a Level 3 autonomous world to enable shopping?
  • How does payment flow work with the Ford console technology?
  • What does shopping look like in a user-owned AV vs. a AV rideshare van?
  • What does the in-person pickup experience look like for various retail stores?

I workshopped with the product owner, creating journey maps and storyboards to help ideate and illustrate the story for shopping partners.

I then created rough mocks and prototyped the functionality to illustrate shopping flows for technology partners both internal and external to Ford to consider in whether they could support Ford AV’s vision.

Entertainment

Ford was beginning to form partnerships with entertainment companies in the interest of collaborating on entertainment content in autonomous vehicles. Through journey mapping workshops, I helped the product owner for the Entertainment vertical imagine the future of entertainment in AV’s.

I facilitated a 20-person in-person workshop a large entertainment partner to help visualize the Now, Near, Far, and ideal journeys from the combined perspectives of the partner and Ford. This workshop was very valuable in identifying how the partnership could be beneficial for both parties.

Maker:S,Date:2017-10-8,Ver:6,Lens:Kan03,Act:Lar02,E-Y

Productivity

Productivity was an earlier-stage concept for AV content. My work in this vertical comprised of creating booth experiences for a large press event and an internal Ford employee conference to exhibit the art of the possible for productivity in autonomous vehicles.

I conceptualized the journey of some personas that would utilize productivity features in an AV, created storyboards for video in the booths, and clarified the journey of a media person who would be experiencing the booth during the Miami Experience press event. I communicated with an event production team to bring the experience to life. See a video about the Miami Experience press event.

Results

The visioning work that I did over 7 months at Ford yielded dozens of business connections and partnerships for Ford, both within their own company and with external companies. The greenfield ideation and exploration that we did prepared the product owners with flexibility to shape the programs towards a feasible form that could be built in the near future.

By the end of my engagement, the Advertising and Shopping product owner had locked down a partnership with a company who could support development for Ford’s vision. The Entertainment product owner had several meetings with high profile entertainment companies, and continued to pursue other possible partnerships with the vision and ideas now documented for use.

I look forward to watching Ford’s track record for innovation and how they continue to build towards a fully autonomous future.