As the leading electric vehicle maker in China, our client is dedicated to providing the ultimate user experience and creating a pleasant lifestyle for their customers. To prepare for the launch of their first high-performance electric vehicle in the domestic market, they asked us to help them design an end-to-end service definition process.

As the design strategist, I facilitated workshops to gather stakeholder requirements, outlined customer journeys for the client, and designed an evaluation framework with the team. I was also responsible for information architecture design and wireframe & interaction design for the final product.
Skills Design Thinking Process, Service Blueprinting, Workshop Facilitation, Interaction Design
Duration 12 weeks (before handover for development)
Industry Automotive
My Roles Design Strategist, Information Architect, Interaction Designer
Team Size 4 - 6 people
Outcomes 1. Envisioned the end-to-end service definition process for China's leading electric vehicle company
2. Created a service blueprint assessment mechanism for providing continuous improvement to existing experience
3. Conducted employee training on service blueprint and assessment framework to help the client product planning team transition to a new way of working
 

Final Design of the Service Blueprint Platform: Atlas

Project Background

The Problem

As electric vehicles gain popularity in China, consumers are increasingly expecting more than just a mode of transportation. They want exciting new experiences that come with owning an EV. The client was uncertain about which ideas to pursue and develop for their new electric vehicles, given the breadth of possible functions and the uncertainty of consumer needs. With a looming product release deadline, they urgently needed a systematic approach to define and evaluate EV experiences.

The Goal

As a result, they sought to design an end-to-end Service Definition process to ensure that they create the ultimate user experience for their customers. The goal was to provide a comprehensive platform that facilitates the entire product design process from start to finish, with a focus on understanding user needs and leveraging design thinking principles to create a seamless experience. The platform would also include an Evaluation Framework that assesses the quality of design ideas & solutions.

An illustration of the project goal

The Challenges

To achieve this goal, we face three major challenges:

  1. How can we understand the entire product definition process in terms of breadth (the customer journey) and depth (design and development)?

  2. How can we create a Service Blueprint Process that enables our users to build EV experiences that’s truly valuable to the customers?

  3. How can we create an Evaluation Framework that provides real-time and meaningful insights?

Challenge 1: How can we understand the entire product definition process in terms of breadth (the customer journey) and depth (design and development)?

It's important to keep in mind that there are two crucial dimensions of EV experience design.

Horizontally, we need to establish a holistic picture of how customers experience the entire EV journey, from the time they place an order to their daily use and maintenance. This journey is what the product and project team need to design for.

Vertically, we need to understand how the internal product design and development process works, as well as how different client teams collaborate with each other. We can only capture this process later with the service definition platform if we understand it.

Understanding Breadth: the customer journey and key stories

Fortunately, the client had already completed some preliminary work in defining the entire customer journey. By leveraging existing materials and conducting competitive research, we have finalized the customer journey as follows:

The entire customer journey the Prodcuct Planning Team need to design for

There are ten major customer journey steps, starting from Customization & Order, Before Delivery, and extending all the way to Repair & Maintenance. These steps capture major interactions between the customer and their electric vehicles.

Moreover, certain journey steps may contain multiple key stories to better outline the customer interaction. For instance, the journey step of Functionality Upgrade can be further broken down into three stories: informing the customer, planning the upgrade, and completing the upgrade.

Mapping out Depth: the Design & Development Process

To understand the current design and development process, we consolidated data from various sources. This included sifting through a large amount of existing documentation as well as facilitating workshops with client teams to gather first-hand data.

Co-Creation Workshops

Mapping out the design & development process with client teams in workshops

Eventually, we gained a clear understanding of how the EV experience is defined and developed among different client teams. When a new experience or function is conceived, the User Research Team records it in a document called the Concept Product Definition (CPS). The Product Planning (PP) Team then fleshes out the concept as a customer journey step or key story in the Experience Playbook. Next, the PP team adds details to the function in the Integrated Product Definition (IPD) document. Finally, the PP team works with the engineering teams in the Function Design Spec (FDS) document to iron out the technical details before the function is handed over for development, where the FDS is further developed into Vehicle Fuction Document (VFD) and Function Enabler Definition (FED).

A simplified illustration of the current design & development process and related teams

The existing process was problematic for several reasons, with the most prominent being that it is scattered across various documents and platforms. As a result, different teams need to scramble through large amounts of materials, which slows down their pace significantly. And it's easy for leadership to lose sight of the whole picture.

Underatanding our User: Key Personas

Among the various teams involved in the product definition process, we synthesized three key personas:

  • Leadership: guide decision-making and ensure teams work towards the company vision

  • Product Planning: define product function & experience

  • Development: transform experience definition into reality

Three key personas that will be our future system users

These three people will also be key users for the future platform that we will design in the next steps.

Now that we have essential knowledge of what the client teams need to design for and how they work together to realize the designs, we are ready to tackle the next challenge.

Challenge 2: How can we create a Service Blueprint Process that enables our users to build EV experiences that’s truly valuable to the customers?

One key insight we gleaned from the status quo investigation is that client teams can easily fall into the trap of single-solution thinking. This can lead them to focus on functional realization, while neglecting the true product value to the customer. As we design the future platform, we need to incorporate a mechanism that ensures client teams remain customer-centered.

Finding the missing link in the design process

We noticed that our client's design process had some resemblance to the Design Thinking practice, which is a user-centered approach. However, a few key pieces were missing. For example, although the research team had conducted user research and created driver/passenger personas, the PP team often forgot about these personas when designing solutions. Additionally, during the solution design phase, the PP team often jumped to the first solution that came to mind, instead of exploring alternatives.

After some brainstorming, we decided to incorporate the entire Design Thinking Process into the new platform. The whole process can be broken down into the following steps:

  1. Research team starts with market & user research to create customer personas for future experience.

  2. Research team creates & maintains full customer journey that can be drilled down to different steps & key stories.

  3. From each key story, PP team defines user motivation and generate ideas to meet this motivation.

  4. For promising ideas, a storyboard is generated to visualize the experience.

  5. Using roleplays, the PP team investigates scenarios, customer emotions, and discover opportunities for improvement.

  6. PP team iterates on storyboards for desired solution.

  7. When solution is finalized, development team fills the functions, enablers and department that are responsible for the realization of this solution.

Bleow is an illustration of the entire design process through Orientation, Motivation, Solution to Application.

To test where the proposed Service Blueprinting process is viable, we tested it with an acutal function — Autonomous Driving.

*For confidentiality reasons, only part of the testing process is shown in detail.

Snapshots of the testing process

Testing results indicate that even complex functions, such as autonomous driving, can be encompassed by our proposed design process. Additionally, we identified several areas for improvement with this new approach. After presenting our findings to the client's leadership, we were granted the green light to move forward.

Challenge 3: How can we create an Evaluation Framework that provides real-time and meaningful insights?

Before we can provide real-time and meaningful insights, there are two factors we need to consider:

  1. What do we evluate?

  2. Who does the evaluation?

  3. What’s the evaluation criteria?

What do we evaluate?

At first glance, answering this question may seemed straightforward. We could evaluate every step of the Service Blueprinting process. However, doing so would be costly and time-consuming. Instead, we worked with the client team to identify a few critical checkpoints. This approach ensures that we focus our resources on the steps with the most uncertainty and value.

In the end, we have identified the following checkpoints:

  1. User motivation: Only proceed to the next steps with strong user motivation to avoid solution-oriented thinking.

  2. Storyboard Experience: Ensure that the function/experience truly creates value for customers and is in line with corporate design principles.

  3. Scenario: Consider all scenarios related to a function in order to prioritize the most crucial ones.

  4. Solution: Evaluate the solution against others to decide which ones to pursue first.

Who does the evaluation?

Due to limited resources and a pressing timeframe, we believe that in the initial stages, PP team members should act as evaluators for two reasons. First, they are more familiar with each other's designs than people from different teams. Second, they are the heaviest users of the platform and therefore have a lower learning curve when it comes to the evaluation process. An added benefit is that they can gain inspiration from their fellow team members' designs.

As the platform matures, the evaluation process can be opened up to other team members or even seed customers.

What’s the evaluation criteria?

Answering this question was more difficult. It was important to consider that the PP team was comprised of people from diverse backgrounds. Therefore, it was crucial to ensure that the criteria were easy to understand and operate with.

With many rounds of co-creation workshop and heavy desktop research, we have agreed on the following evaluation framework with the client teams:

  1. User motivation is evaluated based on its quality. This includes whether it delivers ultimate value, encourages ideation through phrasing, and has a small enough scope for meaningful discussion.

  2. Storyboard is evaluated based on the client’s design principles: Ultimate Ease, Joy through All Senses, Sense of Freedom, Know Me, and Deep Reassurance.

  3. Scenario is evaluated based on its priority, considering the frequency and impact of potential occurrences.

  4. The final Solution is evaluated for its priority based on the Kano model, specifically considering delight and expectation factors.

Below is an illustration of the evaluation framework:

Similar to the Service Blueprint process, we tested the evaluation framework with existing functions to determine its applicability. For instance, we asked client teams to submit a few user motivations and assessed whether we could enhance them using the framework. One motivation that stood out was setting cabin environment remotely with the phone APP, as it demonstrated "solution thinking" instead of "user-centered thinking". By using our evaluation prompts, we were able to guide the client teams towards a more user-focused mindset. Detailed examples can be found in the snapshots below.

*Please note, certain steps of validation were ommited due to confidentiality reasons.

With all three major challenges resolved, we moved into the next stage: Product Design.

Putting things together: Product Design

The design process

For the product design, we moved from lower fidelity to higher fidelity with continuous testing and refinement along the way.

The product design process

Low fidelity sketches

Thanks to our previous work, we now feel confident about how the platform should function. I spent an afternoon sketching out the product layout, navigation, information architecture, and function priorities. This sketch was quickly approved by the client.

Low-Fidelity & Information Architecture design

Medium fidelity wireframes

At this stage, there are two designers working on the project. Each of us took a part of the user flows and frequently critiqued each other's output. We also held many informal sessions with future system users to test the logic and clarity of platform functions. You will find detailed descriptions of key page functions and core process flows in sections below.

Management View

This section outlines the interactions of Platform Overview on both the desktop and mobile versions. While the Management Persona will find this view most valuable, the PP Persona and Development Persona will also use it.

Product Planning (PP) Workflow

The PP team is the primary user of the future platform. They focus on creating storyboards during the Experience Creation phase and refer to both their own storyboards and the Overview dashboard during the Experience Validation phase.

An outline of PP user flow

Experience Creation

Below is a detailed workflow of Experience Creation, consisting of three stages: Motivation, Solution, and Application.

Experience Evaluation

Below is a detailed workflow of Experience Evaluation, consisting of three stages: Experience Evaluation and Priority Evaluation.

Development Team View

Here are the user flows for the Development team. Although most of their tasks will be performed outside of our platform, Atlas, they can easily view the logic behind what is developed and access their most frequently used software through links within Atlas.

High Fidelity Visual Designs

During this stage of the project, another visual designer joined our team. I was responsible for helping him understand key user flows and interactions.

The final visual design closely followed the client's established visual style while also adapting well to the logic and robustness of the design platform.

Service Blueprint Platform Visual Design Demo

Visual designs by Xiaopei Guo.

Design Validations

We want Atlas to be more than just a system that looks great on paper; we want it to be easy to understand and use. To ensure that Atlas is truly usable and valuable to its future users, we hosted several co-creation workshops and training sessions throughout the concept and prototyping stages.

During our design sessions, we were thrilled to see that our workshop participants were highly engaged. They had lively discussions about their designs and responded very positively to the design process.


I feel this process is very intuitive, it follows a logical order. It’s not far from how we design things, but it’s far more clearer than our current process. And I like how everything is linked together in a single platform.

— Quote from PP team member

Paticipants & outputs of co-creation workshops

The Impact

I left the project after the design concept was finalized, but I closely followed its progress. From what I learned, the design concept went straight into development shortly after I left, and the MVP version went live in about three months. The development team continued to work on the project, releasing new features for the next 12 months. Since the Atlas platform went live, the PP team has relied on it to produce new design concepts for their upcoming EV release plans. As planned, our client successfully launched their first two high-end domestic EV models.

Later, I provided guidance to Atlas’s UX designer on establishing the design system. Below are some screenshots of the design system. Essentially, it is an online playbook for the design and development team to quickly align delivery standards.

Challenges & Learnings

One major challenge of this project is understanding the workflow of client teams in creating electric vehicle experiences. To tackle this challenge, we involved client teams in our design process early and often. This allowed us to gain crucial insights into how they navigate uncertainties in their daily work and how they collaborate to turn design ideas into actual experiences.

Another key challenge was ensuring that our system is truly usable and valuable to future users. We conducted co-creation workshops to test the design process, and the results were great. These workshops also increased stakeholder buy-in for the future platform.

This project was short and intense, but it demonstrated how much can be achieved with a systematic design approach. The industry experience and design learnings gained from this project continue to benefit my work today.