VW America - DCC (Dealer Communication Center)

VW DCC was an exciting opportunity to put highly intuitive inter-action principles such as fluidity and exploration into action. Users can find VW dealers via drag, zoom, and point and click on a Google map overlay. More traditional lexical navigation options, such as entering dealers' names or zip codes in a search box, and an alternative list view are also offered.

Besides dealing with the business requirements, functional interface and interaction design, I enjoyed acting as a link between strategy, statistics, usability testing and UX, while adding my qualitative research skills. For example I analysed a medium scale database of qualitative user feedback using NVivo, a qualitative research tool. This allowed me to process a large amount of material in just a couple of days. The resulting easy to grasp graphs were offset with quantitative data from analytics software – allowing the team to gain a very high degree of insight into user behaviour. The user centric processes and team efforts paid off, when the site was tested by an independent automotive body :

BERLIN/LONDON - On Tuesday 2 August JDPower released its latest Automotive website survey results. The site launched by AKQA in the US last year increased its overall score by 57 points, bringing the site to a #13 ranking. This is an improvement in ranking of 19 places from our previous JDPower study and set a 5 year record [for VW].

AKQA provided a fast paced and constructive environment (agile), so solutions could quickly be evaluated and optimised. Since this application lends itself perfectly to mobile use, we designed it so all crucial aspects of the navigation are kept in the 10" (iPad) screen area, while also working closely with the mobile team.

On a personal level I enjoyed being on a bi-lingual account, and having a German chat once in a while to brush up on the latest German net-jargon :)

Activity theory, Personas & Agile at PLC

A large part of my work for PLC (Practical Law Company, a legal publishing house) consisted in exploring, researching and documenting how a very specific user group (i.e. lawyers) interacts with internet based products.

In this process I complemented a few standard research methods, such as demographic personas, with a more activity based approach, which also contained high level flow charts. These high level user descriptions in turn can support a variety of scenario descriptions, user requirement documents, and also help to integrate UCD methods in the context of agile development.

PLC covers a number of  different law disciplines, such as financial, tax, commercial, property, aimed at different supporting lawyers as well as senior staff and partners. The user group of “laywers” is, therefore, a very wide matrix. As part of this work, it was crucial to understand that lawyers working in different fields work in very different ways. PLC produces digests from the latest legal publications, helping busy lawyers update themselves on the latest situations with speed and ease.

This sounds like a functional, rational, highly structured field, where functionality is key. In fact, this was very affective-specific work – lawyers are a highly individual user group. They have to get their facts right, or they can be sued (both privately and as a firm). Winning a case depends on them having the correct up-to-date knowledge.

Having confidence in a digest, such as those produced by the PLC, means an enormous amount of trust and previous research: lawyers double-check PLC’s publications to ensure that they are trustworthy.

Imagine a lawyer going about his work: jumping into a cab, reading PLC information on a Blackberry, and then heading straight into a court-room. We named this key emotional branding moment: the PLC moment. This is the moment when a lawyer trusts the publication material implicitly. This ties in with my research thesis that structural, functional and unstructured, emotional interaction are highly intertwined – and this has never been truer than at PLC.

Position: Senior UXA
Year: 2009 / 2010