Building a New Service in Six Weeks with Adobe XD

A few months ago, Smartly asked Capgemini to design, develop, test and ship their cross platform electric car charging app – in just six weeks.


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Before I go into the details of the design process and how Adobe XD helped us on our way to success, let me explain the brief.

Enable the Ownership of Electric Cars for More People

With a market share of ~23% (2015), Norway is the world leader in the adoption of electric cars. Norwegians’ love for electric cars has gained global attention and has been featured in articles in the NY Times and CNBC to name a few.

However, future growth of e-car adoption is hindered by the fact that there is currently no good way to correctly bill for the costs between residents in apartment buildings or other condominiums.

With Smartly, residents that need to charge their electric vehicle can subscribe to a service to pay for their electrical consumption.

Our Design Process

We have adopted the core model as part of how we work. In brief, this model is all about designing from the inside out, focusing on the main tasks that users will perform. All design decisions are seen in the context of business objectives and user tasks.

Ethnographic research is a key success factor for making usable and valuable products. The whole team has been involved in testing the electric car chargers.

We have also interviewed owners of electric cars, potential owners of electric cars and various persons living in shared households to validate our assumptions.

As lead designer on the project, I considered it critical to select the right tools for the job. With a tight deadline, we needed to get a head start and sketch, prototype and test various concepts from day 1.

We have good experience with Adobe XD from other projects, and suggested to Smartly that we should use this throughout the design process, because it’s built around our needs as designers.

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On a high level, our tasks included:

Throughout the design process we used prototypes created with Adobe XD and Quicktime to do usability tests with screen and voice capture.


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Our experience is that if we ask people for feedback on design and prototypes, we always end up with valuable insights that we would have never thought about ourselves.

Conclusion

We went from the initial briefing to a successful first release for iOS and Android in just six weeks. We made the deadline!

At Capgemini our cross functional team of designers, developers and testers used prototypes as an important communication tool throughout the design and development process.

We removed the silos between design, development and testing. Everyone in the team has worked together and used each other’s knowledge and experience.

Overall we’re pleased with the decision we made to use Adobe XD, which has proven to be a flexible and fast tool that supports our lean design and development process.

Download XD now.