Providing a better Navigation Experience for a global location data company
An ever-evolving technological landscape in location and mobility makes for interesting challenges and demands. HERE is meeting these challenges with design-led initiatives throughout all of their products. With that being said, being scrappy and adaptable is critical. Focusing on the end user as well as direct business and 3rd party customers – not the technology – keeps HERE ahead of the curve.
Business Case
HERE Technologies provides location data services and solutions for the automotive, logistics, healthcare, private sector, and more across the globe.
The Challenge
Location data is ever-evolving and becoming more and more vital to our increasingly connected world. The challenge is to adapt our products and services to a fast-paced industry as well as create new usable and useful products for our ever-growing partnerships and technology sector clients.
Product development is fast-paced, and we are constantly working on and exploring new product territories. The research and design team works globally with many different product stakeholderson on a variety of different products to ensure quality and usability.
Each product and each team has their own process, so being adaptable is important. Luckily, each member of the design team has experience in many different areas of design so our roles may be differ depending on the team we are assigned to. The important thing is collaborating closely with engineers and product management in each agile development environment and being an advocate for the user when decisions are being made.
My Role
UX Lead
Methodologies
Design Thinking, Co-Creation Workshops, Brainstorm Workshops, User Interviews, User Journeys, User Flows, MVP prototyping in HTML & Javascript, User Testing, Sketching, Wire-framing, UI Design, Front-End Development
Tools
Pencil & Paper, Sketch, Invision, HTML/CSS/Javascript, Angular, After Effects
The Results
During my time at HERE, the products have evolved from one-offs created for devices catered to European markets to a global design-led portfolio of solutions that can fit many markets. The company has gathered important partnerships and contracts and are continuing to expand their product base to the Asian market and beyond. With our user-focused direction and with design at the forefront, our products have become top-quality and best-in-class.
The most memorable project I was involved with was a project for Hyundai. Hyundai approached HERE for a traffic map solution for vehicles which did not have satellite navigation. The challenge was to deliver top quality traffic maps over the air via HD radio. Several teams collaborated to come up with a solution that took our existing map product and significantly reduce the size so it could be delivered in this special format. Because of our great teamwork, ability to experiment, and persevere, we successfully pulled off what our competitors could not and we landed the deal.
Here are a few examples of my different areas of expertise and some projects I have been directly involved with:
