Above is a photo of my Five Year Anniversary in the Product Design Office at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles! Technically, it was over seven because of contract work. I started in early 2012 as a product designer on the user experience team developing production uconnect radio theme files and also quick interactive prototypes with the team. I was mostly a product design office studio engineer, helping design prototype apps and build real life concept builds while also contributing creativity to the design process. Working in the UX design offices helped me develop a better understanding of designing for the user as well as thinking about and implementing entire design systems. I build out a lot of interfaces for vehicle displays and was even able to get them to interact with a vehicle via websockets.
I spent a lot of time building radio theme files at first then began collaborating with designers on new interfaces I would create in Adobe Flash, in HTML, and with Unity for AR/VR experiences. I primarily used consumer tablets as they were easy to deploy interfaces to, whether for Android or web pages. For vehicle BUCs, I started using Intel NUC computers for each display, but then moved to using digital signage boxes as they tended to be a bit more robust for transport and boot up. I learned to network content various ways depending on available tech.
I also created lots of devices with Arduinos and Raspberry Pi devices. For building vehicle BUCs, I found it very useful to use digital signage boxes to help push content to the various displays because they also offered GPIO where I was able to connect hardware to my BUC builds as well.
I traveled around the world multiple times on behalf of the design office, to locations as a lead tech developer to build on location and provide support. I really enjoyed my trips to Shanghai where I helped Jeep introduce the future of user experience to the Asian/Pacific market.
Some of the best perks of working in the product design office was occasionally meeting cool celebrities and the availability to vehicles for testing and experiencing. Getting to drive every type of vehicle and brand was a unique and rewarding experience to help understand the great vastness between vehicle classes and their products. Experiencing something firsthand and placing yourself into the user and understanding their needs helps create better designs and solutions that would often be overlooked.
High quality displays and much faster processors have definitely made it into the vehicle, and the future is about to get a bit more interesting with the connected vehicle. Unique vehicle services and experiences will help power the future of mobility and transportation.
