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Message MyFord Touch Ford Motor Company and IDEO collaborated on two major projects to conceive “signature interface elements” that would connect drivers with both onboard technologies and their personal digital devices outside the car in all future Ford vehicles. Ford sought to instill strong “vehicle love” in new drivers and bolster the brand loyalty of its devotees. The team focused on designing an interior/information system that drivers would find attentive, approachable, easy to use, and compatible with portable devices. Five key features were reconsidered in a fast, iterative process that also helped to accelerate innovation on Ford’s development end. The IDEO team spent time with both everyday consumers and “extreme users,” including airline pilots, police officers, and firefighters, observing how they navigated complex information systems (sometimes in highly emotional situations) while in transit. After an intense period of prototyping, refinement, testing, and reevaluation—an iterative process referred to as “build to think”—IDEO went back into the field with a life-size model to simulate driving with the elements it had conceived. The ambitious prototyping effort included a dashboard removed from a Ford Edge, a PlayStation 2, and a projector that played the simulated driving game Gran Turismo 3. The steering wheel and pedal set were fashioned from various game controllers, computers, screens (one of which was touch-sensitive), and other assorted objects and mechanisms. While playing the video game, consumers were asked to change the radio station, find tracks on a 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. It led the team to propose final design solutions that included steering-wheel levers as primary touch points and 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. This demonstrated the impact of using human-centered design to develop memorable digital interactions. IDEO used robust prototyping to facilitate an accelerated decision-making and development cycle. Along with that, the team produced a book of guidelines to help designers and engineers keep these design principles top-of-mind as they moved forward with a signature human-machine interface (and projects that followed it). Ford unveiled MyFord Touch at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. “The MyFord Touch [is] a compelling new system that uses three screens, enables Wi-Fi, opens cars up to third-party apps, and runs on the second generation of Microsoft’s SYNC system,” Tyghe Trimble wrote in Popular Mechanics. The magazine also reported that the automaker aims to offer MyFord Touch in 80 percent of its fleet by 2015, bringing high-end telematics to all of its customers. http://www.ideo.com/work/myford-touch/