With 10+ years experience, I’ve worked on a range of projects across the automotive, financial services, education construction, energy, retail, assisted living and hospitality sectors. Here you’ll find a select few examples of projects I've had the pleasure of working on.
I’m a designer who approaches problem solving by making sense of the intersection between people, technology and business.
Intrigued by the ways in which culture manifests itself in human behaviour, I love delving into the essence of what resonates with people. I translate these insights into meaningful solutions that are engaging, whilst balancing technical and business considerations.
As Nissan embarks to redefine itself as an EV leader within the automotive industry, the Nissan Ariya is the first milestone marking the shift to this future vision. Ariya is Nissan's first 100% electric crossover with breakthrough driver assistance technologies coupled with powerful EV performance, in a sleek exterior design inspired by timeless Japanese futurism.
Publicis Sapient were tasked with exploring ways to create an impactful, immersive online experience giving users the opportunity to experience the Nissan Ariya without physically seeing the car.
UX Lead within a cross-disciplinary team of strategy, UX, UI and management. Tasks included desk research, user testing, workshop facilitation, wireframes, and functional specs.
As EV adoption accelerates, disruptors such as Tesla are pushing older OEMs such as Nissan to rethink their brand and manufacturing strategy.
Through user interviews, we uncovered a set of customer expectations we needed to consider when creating this experience.
With a higher price point, Ariya is competing against premium brands such as Jaguar and Audi. Attracting an audience not typically interested in a Nissan, we needed to reframe the brand as high-end and innovative.
The target audience is smart and decisive, and values a level of control over the type of information they consume when considering options within the car-buying purchasing journey.
Rather than lead with technical jargon, use interactive visual content (e.g. animations or interactions) to distil complex tech into engaging, digestible content, thereby increasing chance of positive recall later in the journey.
Focusing on how Ariya's technology enables customers to lead the lifestyle they want resonates more deeply with customer aspirations and forges a stronger emotional connection to the brand.
People buying premium products carry a more discerning attitude to meeting their expectations, whether it be functional or aspirational.
Whilst considered a brand piece, we defined business objectives to guide us in designing a solution which delivered value through both utility and emotion.
Through research and collaboration, we created a product definition with a clear set of business and user goals. The purpose of the digital experience was two-fold: to bring the emotion of the new Nissan brand, whilst emphasising Ariya's key features.
We wanted the experience to spark curiosity and intrigue, providing just enough detail to pull users deeper into the experience.
The horizon is the essence that ties Nissan and Ariya together as one. This was the central thread to our creative direction. Ariya's design is a physical manifestation of the horizon; from the through-line curvature of the body, to the copper detailing referencing the sun as it breaks through the night to start a new day. Like Ariya, Nissan embarking on the next phase of its company symbolises the dawn of a new era.
The experience had to be not only immersive but it also had to make it easy to learn about features. We brainstormed and ran workshops to define and refine the key messages we wanted our experience to express.
As the initial activity in our workshops, this exercise it helped to break down barriers and get everyone's creative juices flowing, regardless of which department they were from.
We further refined and developed concepts through workshops containing multiple stakeholders in charge of different parts within the business.
These workshops were crucial in aligning both Nissan stakeholders and external agencies that were also involved in this project.
With our approach defined through the workshop sessions, we then created a prototype and ran user testing sessions to validate our hypotheses.
A key insight that came out of user testing was that users were sick of reading content that was too feature-led, as this felt 'run-of-the-mill' and didn't differentiate from competitors.
WIth this in mind, we combined storytelling and utility to bring Ariya to life through interactive moments, bringing her features to life through relevant contextual scenarios.
To explore Ariya's features in an experience-led way, we created stories centred around a framework of chapters and moments. We wanted to move away from feature-led interactions, and so reframed the chapters to elicit an abstract feeling or emotion associated with the name of the chapter. We designed the the chapters and moments to work in a modular fashion to allow for easy addition of moments without breaking wider experience.
The ultimate goal was to visualise the power and value of Ariya's features. For each moment we storyboarded the whole sequence of interactions, using common narrative elements of conflict and resolution to develop relevant narratives.
User research findings warned us of the risks of sounding too patronising through messaging that implied that Ariya would teach users how to drive better, so we formed stories based on contextual scenarios where Ariya can assist, rather than overtake users control.
To make moments feel more relatable, we designed interactions and included ambient noises synonymous with the typical car scenario such as traffic, beeping, lights flashing and visual perspectives.
The experience had to not only be immersive, but allow easy comprehension of technical features.
We stress-tested ideas, playing around with different executions to find the balance between creative-led and feature-led executions.
Desiging a 3D immersive experience was so different to anything I'd designed before.
Wireframes and 2D prototyping only went so far to describing the story and interactions we were trying to achieve. Close collaboration with UI, motion and development was needed leveraging everyone's skillsets to create examples of the experience we were trying to achieve, before it went into development.
Whilst designing for the launch date, we asked ourselves, "How should this experience evolve over time?" Lead generation and a timeline of upcoming Ariya events was our starting point, however we had ideas about how to create an enduring, impactful customer experience.
As we were creating a marketing experience in tandem with when the actual car was being engineered, it was eye-opening to get a glimpse into the process of industrial engineering and design of a product as complex as an electric vehicle. I have a new found respect for the testing and iteration involved to perfect the design and technology of a car - it's on a whole other level to what I've seen designing digital experiences. I now have a greater understanding of the way traditional manufacturing companies and why it is more difficult for them to adapt quickly to change, in comparison to tech-first automotive companies such as Tesla.
