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Charging Dashboard for Kia Connect App

Company: Kia Connect 

Role: Product Owner / UX Designer 

Year: 2019 - 2020

Overview

This project is part of my work as the Senior Specialist Connected Car at Kia Connect.

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement (NDA), I have removed all confidential information in this case study as well as Kia's design elements. All information and work displayed do not necessarily reflect the views of Kia Connect.

Kia Connect

Kia Connect is a tech start-up company belonging to Kia Europe. Established in 2019, Kia Connect provides connected car services to all Kia car owners in Europe. 

Kia Connect mobile App is one of the products offered that allow the connection between Kia cars and users, facilitating remote features as well as generate relevant insights. 

Business Challenge & Proposal

One of the most desired connected car features is the Smart Charging for electric vehicles. It helps electric car drivers prolong their battery life and optimize smart charging schedules. It is a great add-on besides other traditional remote features such as remote start/stop the engine, remote charging, or remote lock/unlock doors. 

To meet customer's expectations, the team and I decided to design the Charging management feature which is accessible from the Kia Connect App. 

My Role

As the Connected Car Experience Senior specialist, I initiated the idea and led the strategy phase to build the use case and UX concept for the Europe region.  My colleagues and I collaborated with other teams from R&D and Product management in order to propose a concept for a Charging management session in the connected car App. I have also confidently taken the role of leading the UX concepts to design the wireframe and medium-fidelity prototype in order to facilitate collaboration with other stakeholders, including R&D and Engineering teams. 

The deliverables include Medium fidelity prototype, Wireframe and Annotation for developers. 

Process

For this project, we went through the below process: 

(1) Customer Feedback analyses

(2) Interview Experts (research)

(3) Customer Journey & Design proposal 

(4) Validation with stakeholders

(5) Design Iteration 

Customer Feedback Analyse

There were multiple channels that our customers frequently use to give direct feedback to us: our Support Center, Website, Social Media, and especially our App's Review section in App Store and Play Store. These were absolutely very rich resource for us to learn about customers' goals and wishes. We collected public data and built a dashboard to understand deeper insights from it, and from there understand what are the urgent needs of our customers. 

 

In addition to that, we also did an in-depth interview project where we conducted a usability test with Kia Connect users through different states, to understand their desire, behavior as well as pain points while using the services. We did gain important insights related to charging management, including:

  1. Users want to control the exact schedule where the charging session for their car would take place.

  2. Users want an easy way to search, mark and get a recommendation for charging stations where their preference is matched.

  3. Users want a seamless experience from software to hardware, from a mobile application to the car navigation and charging system.

  4. Users want to learn about the behaviors, and consumption data of their car's battery, however not able to understand all technical terms and would love to be informed/read about it rather than ask the sale or services advisors 

Expert Feedback

To gain deeper understanding on charging and battery insights, we also interviewed our internal experts including Battery & Charging and R&D colleagues. We reviewed on our understanding and identify improvement areas where data driven insights can be of a great value for users.

Customer Journey

With the data collected, we drafted a customer journey from opening the application to reaching the charging session. Please note that we do not re-design the entire application but apply the current design system to the new feature designed. To show it in my portfolio all elements have been changed to ensure my NDA with Kia Connect.  

Concept Proposals

The new feature contains two session: 

(1) Battery status 

(2) Charging statistic 

Next Section
UX Research Projects

2025 Thuy Tran 

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