Behind The Wheel – Episode 1: Engineering Customer Experience
Toyota has always been customer centric but user experience as a science is really about involving users at every stage of development. We do that through bringing users on site and really asking them to try by doing all these new concepts. What is important is to put the customer in the real world driving situation. We applied the vehicle UX development approach for the first time on this new CHR and it’s really about understanding deeply the target customer for that vehicle. In the case of the CHR, this was a digital native, a new type of customer that we really had to understand discovering his pain points but also his game points. One example of that is the new multifunctional ambient lighting concept. And here we really look to expand not only the ambient benefit of the lighting but also bringing functional benefits such as safety. So imagine you’re running late to meet friends in the city center. You’ve just arrived parked on a busy street and you you want to exit the vehicle quickly. The lights on the door trim will illuminate and warn you, be careful, there’s cyclists approaching. But if you then continue to take the door handle, this light will then flash, warning you not to open any further. for traffic. Another feature that I really love is that the new CHR almost becomes your daily companion. So when you enter the vehicle a little tired in the morning, the ambient lighting will provide a color that will really help invigorate you and start your day. And this time of day feature will also then help you relax in the evening after a long day’s work. You get in the car and you have a much more relaxing muted tone of color that will slowly change during your drive home. The future of user experience is very exciting. We face so many challenges with things like increasing digitalization, increasing automation or sheer number of of systems on the vehicle. This can make the vehicle more and more complex. So our job is to keep it simple but also to make sure that we deliver an exceptional mobility experience for every customer with every drive. I love my job. I love working in user experience. I find it super interesting to really deep dive into user needs and really discovering systems that we believe are quite intuitive. Really understanding the challenges that they can face to real world users.
Meet Fiona Coulter, Head of Vehicle Performance Engineering 1 at Toyota Motor Europe. As the lead on the 2024 C-HR User Experience design, she shares her team’s unique approach to UX design and the challenges they face in delivering an exceptional experience to every customer with every drive.
This is the first episode of the ‘Behind the wheel’ series, where Toyota members talk about our technologies, innovations and projects through their personal angle.
