Bronco Off-Roading Accessories
Performance Bronco
Advanced Lighting and Tire Solutions
About this Project
With the re-release of the Bronco, Ford had the ability to reemerge in a space that had long been lost out to competitors: off-roading. One unique opportunity was in the after-market accessories, specifically in competitive dessert running. The Performance Bronco team reached out to UX Everyday in search of a design thinking study on advance lighting concepts for our off roading and dessert running performance truck and SUV customer. Their timeline was a strict 2 months, and thus was scoped to focus on lighting and tire solutions.
Timing
October- November 2018 ( 8 week sprint )
My role(s)
Coach, UX Researcher, Facilitator
Approach
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To understand our customer and their needs best, we dug deeper through desktop research and customer and stakeholder interviews
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After creating a pre-running journey with 8 unique moments, we hosted a concept generation workshop to find solutions to better the experience.
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Taking the 200+ concepts generated, we prioritized using a desirability and feasibilty matrix. From there, five concepts are moving forward to prototyping.
Frame the central Question
The Performance Bronco team had originally crafted three different central questions:
How Might We Create:
An authentic, aspirational SUV that delivers an unparalleled and definitive off-road experience as well as an unexpectedly pleasant on-road experience straight from the factory
The Halo for the Bronco brand and by extension all off-road Ford SUVs
Be the catalyst to expand non-traditional accessory sales
“How might we build on the trusted and carefree nature of the Bronco brand while offering customers an extreme and unique way to explore and race off-road?”
User Research
Over the month of October, the team completed the following activities to understand the Bronco performance customer and the desert racing experience:
Deep dive of existing base Bronco customer data, including ethnographic research
Research into desert racing (literature and media research)
Customer and stakeholder interviews
To conduct productive interviews, we created two interview protocols, one for customers and one for stakeholders. By interviewing both customers and stakeholders, we are able to learn about the current state, pain points, areas of opportunity and more information about the dessert running journey, as well as the vision the team has for the vehicle. Due to the short time frame, the interviews consisted of customers, some of which work at Ford, as well as members of the base program design team and the PMT Manager.
Identifying Themes and Insights
Through research and interviews, we got three main themes, which then shaped the direction we took the workshop. It also reshaped the central question to focus to pre-running with a focus on tire and visability solutions.
Overall Bronco gives customer the freedom to escape things that hold them back in life, and lets them unleash their inner kid
Bronco customers look for authenticity and honesty
Can’t just look good - needs to perform No technology for technology’s sake
Functionality and durability are primary considerations when selecting a vehicle
Vehicle comfort / ergonomics are important considerations as the customer pushes performance limits
Pre-Racing
Pre-racing is done prior to an official race to identify obstacles and learn the course, and is a social / team activity
Pre-racing scenarios include challenges such as breaking down, getting stuck, navigating difficult terrain / weather conditions, etc.
Racers aim for the “perfect race” (no stopping except for gas) and the preparation done in pre-running is key
Community
There is a community of enthusiasts and racers but often races are a solo sport
Although racing is often a solo sport, pre-racing is a team activity, and “often more fun than the actual race” There is a strong community of enthusiasts and racers (four wheel drive meetups, culture similar to stage rally)
Can be hard to pick this up as a new racer – the barrier to entry is more than just buying a vehicle
Off-roading community is tight-knit and organic – people join by immersing themselves in the activities
Community is focused on shared experiences - the customization experience in particular is a common topic for collaboration
Tires and Visability
Customers brought up several pain points from off-road experience throughout the interviews
Some general potential solutions were discussed with customers to understand values and key considerations for successful designs
Design Principles
From the above observations we can pull our design principles.
Authentic
• Design should be simple and honest. Everything included needs to be easy to use/understand and nothing is included “just for show”
• Technology should only be included when it is adding essential capability
Durable
• Vehicle must be capable of handling extreme use cases common in off-roading. Mechanical failures are only acceptable if it’s way beyond intended use.
• Failures should only come in the middle of a great story.
Shouldn’t be the start of a story: “I was just driving along and it broke.”
Shouldn’t be the end of a story: “It broke and I was done.”
Should be: “I was doing this awesome, maybe pushing the limits a little too far, it broke, but then I used this, and the journey continued…”
Easily Customizable
• Common after-market additions / customizations should not require professional help
• Minimal connections / dependencies between systems (if a customer changes one system, it shouldn’t break other parts of the vehicle)
Ideation Workshop
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An ice breaker at the beginning of a workshop is always a nice kick-off to introduce everyone in the group to each other and pull them out of their comfort zone for the rest of the session. In this case we used the Outside the Box format, where everyone had a sheet of paper, the topic of sports, and thirty seconds to draw off that topic. They then rotated, adding to another’s drawing for thirty seconds, and repeating until they were back at their original drawing and sheet. We then spent the next five minutes sharing out and trying to explain each drawing. This ice breaker was a great focus on having an open mind about everything since we never know where the idea could go until we share it, which was an important part of this workshop.
The rules were to have a device free space, keep an open mind, remember that this is a safe space, and have fun.
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Since our ethnographic research was limited, we decided to use a customer created from a mixture of our interviewees and their responses. The focus of the customer was a person who wishes to escape their job and surroundings and have the thrill of desert racing. They have built a community with like-minded others and focus on this journey being their fun time.
We also listed eight key attributes of the customer that could easily be referenced to keep in mind while ideating: authentic, functional, power, customizable, escape, freedom, capable, and honest. We then gave a brief overview as to the concept of pre-running before delving into the journey.
The pre-running journey was split into 8 unique moments that were taken from research done on pre-running and accounts given from interviewees. Each moment is both a real life obstacle a customer pre-running would face as well as a jumping off point for tire and lighting solutions, such as night running and getting unstuck.
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Given that we had 10 participants we split the group into two, with one group tackling the first four moments and the second tackling the remaining four. Each group had 15 minutes, which was cut to 10, to generate solutions that would be helpful to our customer at that moment. After each section, Sam Bolin would cluster the ideas while the teams continued to ideate. Each moment had a dedicate post-it note color which helped to understand where in the journey it came from. Overall the suggestion would be to give each group 8 minutes or so to ideate as the 10-15 minutes was too long and felt like a stretch, however any less wouldn’t have generated the vast number and variety of ideas that came with a longer time frame.
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After the forty-five minutes of ideating was done, the groups sent one representative for each moment to share out ideas. This allowed the group to have an initial verification of ideas as well as flush out some of the quickly written ideas. An improvement for the next iteration would be to have this five minutes for each moment to occur immediately after the ideation, to help break up the monotony and create a more open environment.
journey mapping ideation results
Prioritization
All ideas organized and ready for prioritization
We ended with over 200 ideas generated which were then clustered into multiple categories to be evaluated with the core group. After spending a day clustering the concepts into 16 unique groups: Tools, Visibility, Power, Getting Unstuck, Staying Clean, Tire Solutions, Services, Camping, Radio/Sync, Comfort Maps/GPS, Organization, Gas Security, Community, and Other/Vehicle.
Final prioritization visual
We then placed all the ideas on a Desirability-Feasibility matrix based on their knowledge base with a focus on which are feasible. This was reviewed by the marketing team to clearly label the desirability. Through this process ideas that are already in progress or a part of the vehicle were weeded out. This was done over2 one and a half hour sessions. These results were then digitized into the below matrix and shared out.
“How might we create a simple, seamless parental leave experience that reinforces the employee’s positive connection to Ford?
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Opportunities IDentified
Lower the barrier of Entry
What We Learned: The vehicle will be engineered with amazing capability, and we know a small percentage of customers will use much of that capability. However, when people experience more of that capability first hand, their minds are blown (source: Vaughn Gitten Jr interview).
Opportunity: A mind-blowing experience is what’s needed to alter behavior, change buying habits, and draw people to the DR1 segment (which Ford owns). To do that, we need to encourage people take their highly capable vehicle on adventures by removing any barriers, and helping them take the first step.
Possible approaches include:
Enable easy DIY customization
Lower the risk of adventuring for new people by providing them with information
Give people the tools needed so they can keep going
Get unstuck fast Fix flat fast
Community Growth
What We Learned: There is a strong community of enthusiasts and racers and this community is tight-knit and organic – people join by immersing themselves in the activities.
Opportunity: Ford is looking to expand its influence in the racing community, and develop vehicles that help people connect with other people.
Possible approaches include:
Reward adventure and reinforce positive experiences to grow the community
Provide customers easy ways to capture and share their experiences with others
Give people the tools needed to get out of a jam in a way that builds community, respect, loyalty.
Quick access to help (via communications)
Ways to connect to the community when not racing
Results
The Performance Vehicle team took the matrix that we created above to choose 5 concepts from our workshop to add to the 5 concepts already decided on to further develop and prototype. These will get user feedback after one pagers and full fledged prototypes are created.
The five concepts chosen are: Off Road Odometer, Persistent selectable drive modes, Accommodation and Usage Target- Ease of Use, Trail Mapping, and 360 View Off Road Camera System.