Digital value-added services are just being discovered by the automotive industry. With the widespread availability of real-time data from vehicles new services can generate additional value for customers and become a new stream of revenue for the car makers. But also new requirements emerge.

For the Volkswagen Group a new challenge arises in remotely managing digital vehicle services like emergency call and road assistance services or external engine control to boost vehicle performance. Because manual configuration is time consuming and not feasible for a large fleet. Making digital services accessible for remote configuration needs to sync with vehicle development cycles with a much bigger time span than digital products and services development.

Great supportive team

Creating digital products and services is always a team effort. For Volkswagen commercial vehicles we had even a small well rounded design team. It is really nice and makes working together much more fun when you share some activities outside work together like going out for lunch or having a "Glühwein" at the christmas market nearby.

Conceptual approach

Preliminary to our project a consulting company created a PowerPoint low fidelity prototype driven only by business requirements. This set the wrong expectations for some stakeholders and had impact on our user research capabilities, which were practically reduced to zero. To recreate trust in a user centered approach we decided on short creation loops and weekly main stakeholder reviews. We also set up a rough road map along primary business objectives, focusing on top user task flows and promoting an MVP approach.