Designing a high-quality HMI experience is a complex process. In practice, involving multiple roles and departments, we need to build a reasonable process to coordinate all work nodes. This doesn't mean rigidifying the design work through a process, but rather ensuring that each stage unfolds systematically in a goal-driven manner. Design innovation is highly challenging; the process is not always smooth sailing and requires continuous, spiraling progress until the project goal is achieved. A well-designed process also helps avoid significant flaws caused by limitations in thinking during the work process. Previously, the automotive industry was technology-driven in innovation, often focusing on producing marketable high-tech products in a highly competitive industry. In this competitive environment, automotive brands are beginning to try user experience-centric manufacturing methods, emphasizing "human-centered" design. But how exactly does one achieve a human-centered approach? This is one of the reasons we are discussing the HMI experience design process. The trend of user experience is sweeping through OEMs.
The increasingly diverse needs of users have led automotive engineers to focus not only on the latest and greatest technologies. At the same time, some automakers have realized that only vehicle designs that meet user needs can guarantee future competitiveness. Integrating user research with the design process can help automakers gain a competitive edge in the fiercely competitive automotive industry. With the continuous development of new energy vehicles and intelligent vehicles, and the widespread application of intelligent digital devices in vehicles, the amount of displayed content is increasing. Ensuring that the user experience of digital interaction is as important as the hardware driving experience requires simpler, more comprehensive, and more user-friendly designs to meet user needs.
The rise of internet-based car manufacturing, exemplified by the Mercedes-Benz concept car, has made one of its greatest contributions by reinterpreting the relationship between people and cars from a completely new perspective. It allows users to understand cars not only through hardware performance, but also by recognizing the equal importance of digital services provided by software. Automakers understand that only by connecting with users digitally and delivering services directly to them can they obtain user data and feedback. This represents a valuable digital asset for automakers, necessitating the creation of new organizational structures to address this changing trend. Whether through internal teams or collaboration with external experience design teams, experience design and operational capabilities will become core competencies for automakers in the future.
Based on this, more and more OEMs are establishing departments responsible for HMI experience design, and their organizational structures are incorporating experience design talent from other fields such as the internet. New collaborative methods are changing existing workflows. How can engineering and design thinking be integrated? How can the new workflow be redefined? How can automotive engineers and internet talent work together? These are all thorny issues that require integrating new team collaboration processes into the already well-established and mature car manufacturing mechanisms. Breaking existing collaborative relationships has also brought about various contradictions and conflicts in the division of labor and cooperation, and it's believed that some automotive manufacturers' management are currently struggling with this. Of course, we also believe that the most critical driving force in all collaborative workflows involving upstream and downstream partners is that decision-makers need to have an open mind. Before answering how to implement HMI experience design, we need to understand the current overall design workflow of automobiles. The production of a car requires a V-shaped development process (from goal setting to goal verification):
This series of processes can be divided into five main modules:
Project initiation is the process by which OEMs establish and implement corresponding projects after analyzing potential market demands through market research and user needs analysis.
The initial goal description, after obtaining data from user needs analysis and market research, transforms this data into design goals, resulting in a preliminary conceptual design;
Once the goals and concepts are confirmed and the functional definitions and product development are agreed upon, that is, the project goals are formally confirmed, and the design of details and specific processes can begin.
Functional verification and production line verification of prototype vehicles. Functional verification mainly refers to bench verification of systems and components and further optimization of systems and components.
Once the prototype is finalized, production pilot testing (PVS) can begin to provide vehicles for specific evaluation and training purposes, as well as for further analysis and quality assurance road testing. After the production pilot testing process is frozen, a pre-production operational rehearsal (OS) will be conducted to fully validate mass production. Once all process steps have been successfully validated and frozen, the product will begin mass production (SOP).
From the current stage of vehicle mass production, we can see that cockpit HMI experience design is only a small part of the process, mostly outsourced to T1 suppliers. This process has significant drawbacks for the digital experience design of new models because there is no forward development. Limited by the capabilities and cooperation of T1 suppliers, it's difficult to create experience designs tailored to the brand's target users, resulting in many models having similar HMI operations and visuals. However, in recent years, we've seen changes. Automakers are building their own HMI experience design teams, though different manufacturers may assign this function to different departments or institutes. Looking ahead, we believe experience designers should be involved from the early stages of vehicle model definition. Since the timeline from project initiation to market launch is at least three years, ensuring its advanced features after launch requires the experience design team to plan forward-looking HMI concepts as early as possible during the model's inception. There are various approaches to this; for example, some automakers consider the concept design of HMI from the perspective of the entire vehicle, designing a platform-based approach to ensure consistency in the HMI experience interaction across the brand's future lineup. Design Thinking Tools and Organizational Culture Change: HMI (Human Interface) experience design is an increasingly important part of the overall vehicle experience. Besides major automakers establishing dedicated departments for research, major internet giants have also joined the fray. This demonstrates the rising importance of HMI and the growing emphasis on user experience. In the entire vehicle production process, user experience, as a way of thinking, will permeate the entire process. The essence of the experience design process is not the rigid, mechanical execution of each step of the workflow. Achieving a human-centered, experience-driven approach requires a transformation in the team's organizational culture. Previously, many believed that design processes were merely formalities and difficult to implement; we believe this is a misunderstanding. As shown in the diagram, the connection between design thinking tools and organizational culture reveals that at different stages, it requires a collaborative learning process involving the entire organization, not just an individual's understanding of the experience process implementation. This is the key reason why processes often fail to execute!
HMI Experience Design Process and Design Innovation Cockpit: HMI experience design is a creative process based on rational analysis. Therefore, in addition to designers (user research, interaction design, visual design, motion design, sound design, 3D design, etc.), all R&D participants need to coordinate and communicate with departments such as marketing, planning, connectivity technology, and branding to reach a consensus on requirements in the early stages. As shown in the diagram below, the innovation of commercial products is not just the result of designers working behind closed doors; it requires analysis from multiple dimensions, including technology, commercial feasibility, and human values.
In vehicle development projects, HMI (Human Interface) experience design should be involved from the project initiation stage, assessing the introduction and finalization of requirements from a platform perspective, and proceeding concurrently with prototype development. During the verification and evaluation phase, bench simulation testing is used for experience verification and design iteration. Finally, in the engineering development verification phase, real-vehicle functional testing is followed up until the product is finalized and mass production begins. The triangle area represents the depth of supplier involvement in each stage; it is merely an illustration of internal and external collaboration methods, and the cooperation between different automakers and suppliers will vary.
The user experience design process is broken down into detailed tasks across each stage. We define the overall process as four phases: requirements analysis, creative design, validation and evaluation, and engineering development. Based on these four phases, we define the specific implementation as eight task nodes: exploration phase, analysis phase, concept co-creation, solution design, bench validation, design iteration, vehicle validation, and product finalization. Furthermore, we have categorized these nodes from a project management perspective. Each phase includes detailed and specific tasks, encompassing as many tasks as possible. Different project situations require selection and combination from this task list, necessitating a reasonable task flow assessment based on each vendor's specific circumstances.
Although the process relationships between each stage are expressed linearly, in reality, there will be overlaps and repetitive cycles at each node. This requires effective judgment and decision-making from team managers. It is crucial to confirm whether the goals have been achieved in each stage and whether the output of each stage can drive the smooth progress of the next stage.
