Customer Experience Manager at Rightware
Locate | Pier 27, San Francisco, CA | May 30–31, 2018
At Locate — two-days of all things maps, location, and sensors—we’re exploring how companies are customizing maps to create entirely new user experiences. Right now, the mobility industry is sitting at a unique intersection of maps and design. Now that cars are more connected, we’re seeing traditional control panels transform into intelligent, responsive dashboards.
Åsa Forsell, Customer Experience Manager at Rightware, will be speaking at Locate about how driver UX is evolving. Rightware are the makers of Kanzi Studio, a Photoshop-like design environment for in-car displays. Kanzi software is deployed by 35 automotive brands and is live in millions of cars worldwide. They just released a plugin for designing maps with our HD vector tiles.
Åsa gave us some insight into what the future of navigation and map design may look like and the key challenges ahead.
How is the driver experience and UI changing in connected cars?
For cars, pervasive connectivity really is a big change. Cars have almost always been connected in some way, with radio, GPS, and more recently cellular data, but the information flow has mostly been one-way. As more cars gain 4G/LTE connectivity, a whole new level of interactive information, entertainment, and even safety-related services are set to emerge.
A significant opportunity exists in voice control. Consumers are beginning to accept this in smartphones and home devices. The driver will be able to interact with the car to control both automotive functions and infotainment services like maps and music in natural ways, while keeping eyes on the road.
As technologists and UX designers, we will have to think about the availability of the network. Consider your phone: when you lose connectivity, there’s almost nothing you can do with it until the signal returns. In the car, the user experience will have to be designed to ensure loss of coverage will not prevent safe use of the vehicle.
A longer-term perspective on connectivity is that the user experience will become more personalized: UIs will adapt to personal preferences, and these preferences will follow drivers from vehicle to vehicle. Also, car manufacturers will have more possibilities to understand their customers and offer services tailored to the individual. Whereas cars today stay relatively unchanged once they are driven off the lot, connectivity allows vehicles to be updated and renewed as new technologies and services are released during the car’s lifecycle.
All this tech is already in place. Now it’s just a matter of implementation.
What advances in maps and location services are having the biggest impact on the in-car experience?
As cars gain more digital displays, and as those displays get larger, drivers will interact with maps, location-based services, and navigation in more intuitive ways. Map visualization will become more natural and more adaptive across displays like the center console, the instrument cluster, head-up displays, and personal devices like smartphones.
The combination of connectivity technologies and real-time 3D rendering revolutionizes how maps can be designed and used in the car. Visually rich maps can seamlessly adapt based on context: which screen is in use, conditions inside the car, weather, traffic, even the driver’s alertness, physiology, etc.
We have integrated the Mapbox backend into Kanzi Maps, our Kanzi UI plugin which integrates map visualization and design into our UI development toolchain. Kanzi Connect is our connectivity platform to bring multiple data sources and services into a single unified user experience. Together, these technologies can turn your wildest mapping ideas into reality.
What are you personally most excited about exploring at Locate?
I’m interested to see how other industries are looking to take advantage of advances in maps, and hopefully take some inspiration back home to apply in the automotive industry. I’m also excited to see how the combination of new mapping, artificial intelligence, and connectivity technologies will transform the automotive services as we know them.
We’ll be releasing the full slate of Locate speakers and sessions soon. You’ve only got a couple of days left to snag discounted early bird tickets, so get your Locate tickets now.
Speaking @ Locate: Åsa Forsell was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.