High-End Concept Design for Connected Car-Sharing Solution

Business challenge

Intellias design team set the goal to redefine the customer experience with car-sharing services that are now hitting the mainstream around the world. We aimed to envision that Intellicar, a next-gen human machine interface application, would pick up on the challenges of existing solutions and offer a valuable alternative in terms of functionality and the overall user experience.   

Our market research led us to a series of findings that became the key drivers for our connected car-sharing concept design:

• Unlike typical car-sharing systems that provide only basic services such as car search and parking, Intellicar will cover a range of vital features to create a personalized and enjoyable experience for users.
• The many glitches of car-sharing apps don’t do justice to this new mobility concept and can turn customers off from using it. People need a high-quality, well-functioning solution that would remove the stress of messed-up orders, sub-optimal routes, and double charges.
• Most importantly, a connected car HMI must never be a distraction to the driver. The way the system works and interacts with the user should be intuitive and easy for perception—where a quick glimpse at the dashboard will suffice to assess the road situation and make the right decision. The price of any extra distraction on the road is a human life, therefore Intellicar’s design must eliminate all health and safety risks.  

With these considerations in mind, and on the basis of Intellias in-depth expertise in automotive software development, our team got started on the design of a new-to-the-market connected car-sharing solution.     

Solution delivered

Before anything else, we worked out our key Buyer Personas to identify users’ needs as well as customize and personalize their journeys:

• Businessman

Tight schedules and rapidly changing plans demand high mobility and good spatial orientation, even in a strange city or country. The system tracks all changes made to the calendar, synchronizes them, rebuilds the route, finds an available parking area, and provides guidance to the destination.     

• Frequent traveller

Public transportation, car rentals, and taxi services have their limitations for tourists, including price, availability at night, and public transport coverage of remote areas. Our solution caters to the needs of even the most distant travelers, creating a route based on the waypoints specified by the user. The app also provides up-to-date information on local accommodations, places to eat, shopping opportunities, and more.    

• Urban mobility forerunner

As people throughout the world are increasingly becoming more environmentally conscious, the demand for car-sharing services will continue to soar. Intellicar is well suited for electric cars, as it calculates how long the battery will last and searches for recharging stations to add to the route.   

After we had built buyer personas, our team’s next step was to create a Customer Journey Map that visualizes what the user’s route would look like from start to finish.   

The interaction between the user and the service is split into four main stages:

• Trip planning

A user profile stores preferences from previous trips such as favorite music, climate control settings, ergonomic adjustments, and payment options. Using a mobile app, a customer can select a car, set the time, enter the start and end points, and order a ride. Our connected solution interacts effectively with the vehicle, ensuring a seamless ordering process.    

• Waiting for a vehicle 

The system notifies the customer about the expected time of arrival and walks them to the vehicle’s location. The user can recalculate the route by including new waypoints. The app then downloads updates as soon as the customer gets into the car.   

• Driving

Personalization of media and ergonomics happens when the user enters the vehicle. The data exchange with other connected vehicles enables the system to notify the driver about road incidents ahead such as traffic jams, blocked roads, construction sites, accidents, faulty or broken traffic lights. The app reroutes the itinerary and notifies about the estimated time of delay.  

• Arrival and the last mile

When the journey is coming to a close, Intellicar offers last-mile guidance that includes smart parking, painless payment processing, and a pedestrian route to the destination. 

At the stage of high fidelity prototyping, we worked through the logic of each step and created wireframes and flowcharts to demonstrate the core of the system and behind-the-scenes communication between a human and the system. 

Our concept consists of a mobile app and a head unit app for the automotive segment. The head unit includes a dashboard, a calendar, a route, navigation, an infotainment system, car settings—everything that matters to the user is integrated into the system. 

However, watching out for road signs, traffic, pedestrians, and interacting with a complex HMI can create a huge cognitive load on anyone behind the wheel. Consequently, above all else, we focused on navigating the driver through the route, ensuring a stress-free and undistracted experience. 

Since Intellias has been delivering competitive automotive solutions for years, we relied on an accumulated research base of most suitable font sizes, color contrasts, and graphic elements to give maximum eye comfort and simplify perception and decision-making. Our solution doesn’t require a great deal of the driver’s attention. The most we could expect from the user is to quickly change a song while waiting at a red light.    

Intellicar provides a range of functions and features that make it stand out from other connected car applications and benefit drivers on the go. 

1. Dashboard

A personalized dashboard greets the user, offers driving settings based on previous preferences, and suggests waypoints after calendar synchronization.    

2. Route planner

The driver can plan a trip, taking into account the current road issues, and edit the route by adding or deleting waypoints. The system also features “points of interest,” the locations that the user habitually prefers to visit.   

3. Driving settings

The driver can change the settings for climate control, driving mode, lights, and doors. For example, to prolong the battery life in electric cars, the system can operate in the eco-mode with dimmed lights and a reduced air conditioning load.

4. Schedule sync

Data synchronization happens in real time during the ride. The app notifies the user about new calendar updates which then can be added to the route. 

5. Personalized media

Song lists are uploaded from the user profile, and the customer’s favorite music is on.

6. Smart parking

At the end of the trip, the system notifies the driver about all open parking spaces close by and guides the user to the parking area.  

7. Automatic payments

Funds are withdrawn from the user’s account automatically once the driver approaches a toll gate or leaves the car. 

Instant payments enable the driver to order, for example, a coffee while still on the move. The user pays for it on the go, drives up to the location of the coffee, and gets it.  

8. Route to destination from parking

The mobile app builds a walking route and guides the user from the parking lot to the final point. 

Business outcome

Our team has ideated and designed a pioneering connected car-sharing solution that goes to show how safe and fast mobility within a city or country can be effectively achieved. Intellicar allows integrating vehicles into the global IoT network, facilitates car ordering and delivery, and gives access to hundreds of connected cars that can personalize navigation, infotainment, and payments. 

Based on our insights into commuters’ pain points and our clients’ needs, we have introduced a series of new services that will allow the market to further develop and grow with our consumer IoT software and mobile app development solutions. A wide variety of businesses can benefit from personal settings and preferences data that travelers let the system use. Intellicar allows modeling customer behavior by suggesting additional services, alternative routes, and points of interest. Users, in turn, will enjoy highly personalized experiences during their journeys and get new traveling opportunities. 

Our solution promotes a mutual value-added interplay between users and businesses, where customers receive quality services for a reduced price and have access to flexible payment options in return for their personal data that companies can efficiently monetize.   

The solution we have developed brings these advantages to the user

• Opportunity to travel comfortably from point A to point B within a country
• Option to select different cars for different cases on demand
• Opportunity to cancel or pause the subscription anytime with flexible terms
• Secure, instant, automatic payments connected to the vehicle
• Flexible payment system: prepay, monthly, annually, afterpay
• Personalized navigation and ergonomics 
• Personalized advertisements and POI suggestions based on user interests
• Personalized dashboard and infotainment systems
• Route planner, calendar synchronization, and traffic overview 

Our project presentation on Behance allows for a more detailed visualization of the Intellicar concept design.