developing a simple and efficient way to develop car apps
Android for Cars App Library for Android Auto
A global set of apps created with Car app library v1
Project: The Android for Cars App Library allows developers to bring navigation, parking, and charging apps to the car. It does so by providing a set of templates designed to meet driver distraction standards and taking care of details such as the variety of car screen factors and input modalities.
Design guidelines published to help developers and designers create their car app easily.
Process: This is a multi-year project that had ambiguous scope and dependencies. It involved close coordination with external partners as well as internal Auto/Google teams. Library has been released as part of Jetpack in early 2021.
My role and responsibilities: I have been the UX lead for this multi-year program from early on. Worked closely with Eng/Pm to define the product and team processes.
i wore many hats, design lead, qa…
this project needed me to expand my knowledge … at times went deep to understand apis to design the right kind of interafce, or work with seafety experts to understand implications of giving developers too much or too little flexibility.
Announced at Google I/O by my product manager and me, Car app library coming over to Android Automotive OS.
I advocated for a unified foundational design across in the library across platforms. User and developers needs rarely differ in car interfaces according to platform. With this vision, developer/designers can create a single car app design and deploy it across platforms.
Design leadership
product definition
research
ui design & Prototyping
Design for flexibility that meet global user and developer needs
started understaing early access partner needs
audited mobile and existing car apps
define dthe set of templates, redefined for a viable set, got developer feedback constantly while deisgning
worked with viusual and motion deisgners
each template is designed to respond to various usecases.
whole system is deisgned to let developers create their own unique or common app architecture and user flows, express branding and customize content as they need to.
safety framework built in
Defined a generalizable UX-restriction framework to ensure that apps were Driver Distraction optimized, yet flexible enough for developers to design meaningful experiences for their users.
research - simulator and in-car research, secondary research
worked closely with safety experts
all that worked meant that developers do not need to think about safety.
developer facing design guidelines
I worked closely with a writer and other designers to create our developer facing Design guidelines.
these guidelines aim to help developers understand library capabiltities, best practices for car apps, see sample usage created by my team.
impact and developer feedback
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