Ford Motor Company and IDEO collaborated closely on two major projects to conceive signature interface elements for all future Ford vehicles launching in 2010. The elements connect drivers with in-car technologies and let them stay connected to their digital lives outside the car. Five key features were reconsidered through extensive research, prototyping, engineering, and robust interaction design, a fast, iterative process that helped to accelerate innovation on Ford's development end, also. Wanting to induce strong “vehicle love” among new Ford drivers—and deepen their devoted customers’ brand adherence—a team of IDEO and FORD designers and engineers focused on designing an interior information ecosystem that drivers would find attentive, approachable, easy to use, and would allow them to keep in touch with their busy lives.

The IDEO team began by going out in the field to drive with consumers, to see firsthand how they interacted with their cars’ information systems. For further inspiration, the team also spent time with “extreme users” such as airline pilots, police officers, and firefighters: men and women who have to safely navigate highly complex information environments in highly emotional situations—all while on the go.

Back in the studio, the IDEO team began an intense period of prototyping, refinement, testing, and reevaluation—an iterative process referred to as “build to think.” To get quick initial feedback, the first prototypes were intentionally rough: a magnetic dashboard where drivers could spatially arrange controls to their liking, for instance. To truly understand the cognitive and emotional factors at work while driving, however, the team decided to do a second round of consumer testing where people sat inside a life-sized prototype and simulated driving with all the new features.

The ambitious and ingenious prototyping effort included a dashboard removed from a Ford Edge, a PlayStation 2 and projector that played the simulated driving game “Gran Turismo 3,” the steering wheel and pedal set were created by hacking several game controllers, game steering wheels, computers, two screens (one of which was touch-sensitive), and various other objects and mechanisms. While playing the video game, consumers were asked to change the radio station, find tracks on their built-in music server, pick up phone calls, and find the nearest gas station. All together, this created an immersive experience that tested cognitive load while driving and led the team to propose final design solutions that utilized steering-wheel levers as primary touch points and created simple, spatial mapping systems for complex, multi-layered information.

Knowing that in the automobile industry, full-scale, highly-detailed “bucks” or models are traditionally used to evaluate new designs, the IDEO team built a second, more functional and refined desktop buck that Ford designers and stakeholders could sit in and interact with that would communicate the impact of using people-centered design to fuel memorable human-machine interactions. IDEO used robust prototyping to facilitate an accelerated decision-making and development cycle. Along with that a guideline book was produced to keep those design principles front of mind for the designers and engineers as they moved forward with signature human-machine interface and projects that followed that.