Design Challenge
Dogfooding through an online route planner
Our challenge was to create an online routeplanner with the following objectives:
- Create a tool to succeed TomTom MyDrive;
- Build this tool with the new SDK (also created by our team);
- Use feedback from this tool to improve the SDK and other TomTom map services (dogfooding)
Vision explainer video used as a communication vehicle internally at the start of the project. I needed to find a way to sell it and engage our stakeholders because of TomTom's history with tools like this.
Search whilst planning
An observation during our research was that users had a lot of tabs/windows open whilst planning or took notes elsewhere. The insight we got was that none of the route planners out there had the ability to discover places whilst creating a route at the same time. After a couple of ideas, iterations and user tests we landed on the idea that a user could discover at any time of the experience. Leaving the route in progress easy accessible in the background and any discovery action in context of this route.
TomTom Labs
We created a space within our live environment where we could experiment with features without breaking the experience for the average user. Next to user testing and analytics we used this space to gather feedback to improve our route planner as well as our SDK.
Design system and product choices
Even though being a TomTom product we deviated from the companies primary colour red as it is less suitable within a car and a complex system like this. This meant heavy stakeholder engagement/management from myself and the product leadership team. TomTom maps will play a key part in TomTom's product offering in terms of validation, experimentation and showcasing.
We've used an atomic design system which allowed us to scale and adapt easily with in the TomTom product landscape. Be aligned with other TomTom products whilst establishing the product as the key driver for all of them. It also allowed us to easily white label features and components for the SDK. Using Figma, we collaborated on a main library shared and managed by UX ops and combined that with an additional product library and in some cases we even shared libraries with other products.
My role as design lead
I've led the design team (researcher, interaction designer and visual designer) and helped forming the product team from scratch with the product leadership team. As part of the TomTom UX leadership team, I was also responsible for alignment, quality and stakeholder management. Together with my team we went from concept, ideation, prototypes, tests and everything in between to launch.
TomTom Maps launched in Beta in Q1 2022 under plan.tomtom.com.
