I was hired by Ford in January 2018 as a product designer for the transportation as a service (Taas) group, which is part of Ford Mobility. During my time in TaaS, I was responsible for designing the public facing (GoRide website){www.goride.com}, as well as working on select internal tools such as exporting billing information for GoRide administrators. After working in the AV TaaS group for about six months, I moved to the Corktown office where I was the product designer for the accompanying rider app for Ford's Miami Experience. After the Miami Experience concluded, I was officially moved off of the AV Taas team, and am now focused on designing applications that will be used by both internal Ford employees as well as external users.
Upon starting at Ford, I was assigned to the transportation as a service (TaaS) team. I was specifically assigned to the non-emergency medical transportation team where I was to work on creating their public facing website as well as maintaining a rider app that was made exclusively for Ford employees. On my first week on the job, I took multiple rides using the existing app so I could familiarize myself with it as identify any potential usability issues with the rider app. I also took advantage of riding in the shuttles to talk with the drivers to identify any potential pain points that they had with the accompanying driver app.
My initial work on the rider app began by cleaning up the existing Sketch file. Some of what I did to clean up the file consisted of ordering and relabeling elements in the label panel, creating and applying text styles, and turning common elements across artboards into symbols. After doing that, I uploaded the elements into Invision’s Design System Manager so that they could be used by other designers if they were to ever work on the rider app.
While I was working on the rider app, I was also assigned to work on the public facing website for GoRide. When I started, they had no public facing website, so this would be the publics first exposure to GoRide. I stated off by gathering requirements with GoRide stakeholders, and then sketching out three different website designs.
After doing that, I asked the senior designer on the team to give feedback on what I had come up with, and then started to combine elements from the previous designs into one new design. After that, I added text to the page to make it seem more realistic, and then ran it by the GoRide stakeholders for approval. After I received their initial approval, I focused on refining specific aspects of the design (such as the background), as well as refining the information displayed throughout the website.
Along with designing on the public facing website for GoRide, I also worked on other aspects of GoRide. I was responsible for designing email notifications that would be sent to our users when they completed a certain action, such as booking a ride or paying a bill. I was also responsible for designing a facilities specific page as well as the export functionality to the GoRide administrative portal.
In May I was moved to the newly opened Corktown office, which is where Ford has placed many of its employees who are working on electric and autonomous vehicles. When I moved to the Corktown office, I was assigned to create a mobile application for an upcoming event that was designed to showcase the progress that Argo & Ford had done in regards to autonomous vehicles. This event turned out to be the Miami Experience, which was covered by multiple tech websites. can read a more in depth look at my Miami Experience work here.
After the Miami Experience was complete, I started working on redesigning the rider app for the employee ride shuttle (ERS) program. The shuttle program had an app at one time, however it has been discontinued, and riders had to call the dispatchers themselves in order to schedule a ride. I first started off by looking at screenshots of the old rider app, as I wanted to make sure that the first release of my application was on par with the old app feature wise. After that, I began whiteboarding workflows for booking the ride, waiting for the ride, during the ride, post ride and profile screen.
Next, I took what I had sketched, and began transferring them into Sketch as wireframes. I made wireframes for both iOS and Android, as I wanted to do user testing on Invision using the native phone prototype that users were used to. I conducted the user interviews both in person as well as over WebEx in order to determine whether the flows I designed for the app were easy to understand and use. I also took the time to ask users what they liked about other ride hailing/sharing apps, and what they’d want to see in our app in the future.
After the testing concluded, I began working on a high fidelity prototype while making changes based on the feedback that I received. As I completed the screens, I uploaded them into Invision so that the developers could start working on them. Once the screens started to be developed, I split my time between identifying, prioritizing, and working on future features, and reviewing the app as the developers complete their sprints.
As of now, I am still working in AV LLC where I am developing mobile and desktop interfaces for future Ford products. If you’d like to know more, please feel free to get in touch with me by emailing me at jdeheus2@gmail.com.