UX Case Study

Lucid Air

Lucid Air

Digital Help Center

Digital Help Center

In-Vehicle User Interfaces

In-Vehicle User Interfaces

Overview

The digital ecosystem within every Lucid Air is designed for effortlessness. It’s incredibly intuitive, easy to use, and seamlessly interacts with your own devices. From details like the crisp, clean design of the UI, to facial recognition and Alexa-enabled commands, to tactile elements like buttons and displays, the entire experience will aid and delight you.

There were luxury cars, then EVs; now there’s Lucid — the new generation of luxury electric.

Role & Duration

Sr. UX/UI Designer (Full-Time)

Mar 2021 - Sep 2022


Product Team:

Derek Jenkins - SVP of Design and Brand
Ben Kelman - Sr. Product Manager

Nicky Hope - Sr. Visual Designer
Ben Karl - Sr. Copywriter
Shealtiel Mulder - Software Engineer

My Role

Applying principles of Human-Centered Design to solve complex systemic problems and create delightful experiences. Currently designing a futuristic mobility experience at Lucid Motors.


In more detail, I am involved in the design of several projects at the company. I lead large domains such as:

  1. Projected Experiences (Android Auto; Apple CarPlay)

  2. Digital Help Center

  3. Localization Integration


Other projects include Calendar, Vehicle Modes, Notifications Framework, Design Resources for Bootup and System Performance, Autonomous Driving/ADAS Data Visualization, Timezones, and Trailer Mode for SUV Gravity.


Applied Skills: Design Thinking, User Journey Mapping, User Stories, Wireframing, Rapid Prototyping, Usability Testing, UX and Visual Design, Design Systems, and Localization.

The Problem

Currently, the only in-vehicle support the customer can access is the owner’s manual.


The owner’s manual is dense, static, text-heavy, and primarily used when things go wrong.


Our customers deserve support and service experiences that value their time and exceed expectations of convenience and personalization.


There is an opportunity to build on the web-based digital owner’s manual to create an industry-leading On-Board Help Center that includes consumable, actionable, and exploratory features such as:

  • Popular Quick Reference Topics

  • How-Tos & Quick Start Guides

  • Feature Spotlights

  • Rich Media Content (Videos, Animations)

  • Service Integration

Final Result

If you don't have time to go through the entire case, below you can see the main screenshots of the iterations, which will be described further in the UX case. You can also click on the link below to see the solutions and the results straight away.

Before

After

After After

Empathize

J.D. Power’s Customer Service Index Study Shows
Necessary Investment in Support & Service



The Study:

Surveyed 63,000 registered owners and lessees of 2018 to 2020 model-year vehicles.


The study examines customer satisfaction with maintenance and repair service.


Porsche (899/1,000) ranks highest in satisfaction among premium brands, followed by Lexus (895), Infiniti (887), Cadillac (883), and Lincoln (872).


The Insights:

  1. Battery-electric vehicle owners are less satisfied with service:

    • “Not only are their vehicles more difficult to service than traditional ICE vehicles, but also the lower frequency of visits means dealers have fewer chances to make a positive impression on these customers.”


  2. Battery-electric vehicle owners are less satisfied with maintenance than repairs:

    • “BEV owners are 2.5 times more likely to not experience their service completed right the first time.”


  3. All generations surveyed showed a preference for internet scheduling:

    • Satisfaction is 75 points higher (out of 1,000) among customers who have an all-digital experience compared to all-analog.

    • Respondents prefer scheduling service via the internet and text messages rather than by phone.

    • 34% of customers prefer to communicate via text message, yet this only happens 9% of the time.


  4. Dealers influence how owners feel about the value of technology:

    • Without dealer education, owners often do not fully understand the technology and its value, presenting a challenge for overall acceptance.

    • Owners are more than twice as likely to learn about their vehicle technology from an outside source (71%) than from a dealer (30%).


Sources:

1: https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2021-customer-service-index-csi-study​
2: https://www.guideautoweb.com/en/articles/49836/top-car-brands-for-customer-service-in-2019-according-to-j-d.-power/​
3: https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2021-us-tech-experience-index-txi-study

J.D. Power’s Customer Service Index Study Shows Necessary Investment in Support & Service

The Study:

Surveyed 63,000 registered owners and lessees of 2018 to 2020 model-year vehicles.


The study examines customer satisfaction with maintenance and repair service.


Porsche (899/1,000) ranks highest in satisfaction among premium brands, followed by Lexus (895), Infiniti (887), Cadillac (883), and Lincoln (872).


The Insights:

  1. Battery-electric vehicle owners are less satisfied with service:

    • “Not only are their vehicles more difficult to service than traditional ICE vehicles, but also the lower frequency of visits means dealers have fewer chances to make a positive impression on these customers.”


  2. Battery-electric vehicle owners are less satisfied with maintenance than repairs:

    • “BEV owners are 2.5 times more likely to not experience their service completed right the first time.”


  3. All generations surveyed showed a preference for internet scheduling:

    • Satisfaction is 75 points higher (out of 1,000) among customers who have an all-digital experience compared to all-analog.

    • Respondents prefer scheduling service via the internet and text messages rather than by phone.

    • 34% of customers prefer to communicate via text message, yet this only happens 9% of the time.


  4. Dealers influence how owners feel about the value of technology:

    • Without dealer education, owners often do not fully understand the technology and its value, presenting a challenge for overall acceptance.

    • Owners are more than twice as likely to learn about their vehicle technology from an outside source (71%) than from a dealer (30%).


Sources:

1: https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2021-customer-service-index-csi-study​
2: https://www.guideautoweb.com/en/articles/49836/top-car-brands-for-customer-service-in-2019-according-to-j-d.-power/​
3: https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2021-us-tech-experience-index-txi-study

Define

We can provide delightful and gratifying on-board support features to all customers

Illustrative support & service personas to explore

* These personas are illustrative and meant to guide thinking on high-level objectives. As next steps, we aim to validate and expand on these personas through user research.

Digital Help Center Objectives and Key Results

These OKRs also drive reassurance, build trust for new and existing customers, and reduce service costs for both customers and Lucid.

Example User Flows

Then, key user scenarios were developed to understand users’ motivations and needs in the context of how they would use the design. The scenarios aim to help the product team develop ideas, iterations, and conduct usability testing of optimal solutions. To understand the full scope of the user’s issues, the scenarios were divided into three groups: Self-Service, Non-Urgent Service, and Emergency Service. As an example, I will show the most complex and interesting scenario: Emergency Service.

Scenario #3: Emergency Service

These OKRs also drive reassurance, build trust for new and existing customers, and reduce service costs for both customers and Lucid.

Example User Flows

Then, key user scenarios were developed to understand users’ motivations and needs in the context of how they would use the design. The scenarios aim to help the product team develop ideas, iterations, and conduct usability testing of optimal solutions. To understand the full scope of the user’s issues, the scenarios were divided into three groups: Self-Service, Non-Urgent Service, and Emergency Service. As an example, I will show the most complex and interesting scenario: Emergency Service.

Benchmarking

The help center was benchmarked against other luxury cars, as well as leading products from the non-automotive digital industry.

The study showed that the automotive industry has very poor service centers for users, and many users find them incomprehensible and inconvenient to use. In contrast, digital products have advanced much further, providing a richer package of services and striving to cover the needs of their users as much as possible. Digitization of support content allows us to look outside the automotive industry for new opportunities.

Tesla’s Support & Service Experience​

Mercedes’ Support & Service Experience​

Support & Service Experience​ outside automotive

BMW’s Support & Service Experience​

Ideate

Toward a Proof of Concept:
Customer Support and Service Storymap

To help understand the functionality of the product and the ways to use it, a team of three people (myself, another designer, and a product manager) developed a storymap.

Toward a Proof of Concept:
Customer Support and Service Storymap

To help understand the functionality of the product and the ways to use it, a team of three people (myself, another designer, and a product manager) developed a storymap.

Prioritization

The next step was to prioritize the list of previously selected cases.


Prioritization

The next step was to prioritize the list of previously selected cases.

Prototype

Owner’s Manual Digitalization

For the entire Digital Help Center project, the development of the Digital Owner’s Manual was set as a priority. It was intended to be a text document with a clear hierarchy and navigation. Therefore, it was decided that its content should be placed on the center screen of the CID inside the car.

Screen Architecture

The Lucid Air consists of the following screens for drivers and passengers:

I started working on the design of the Owner’s Manual, and from the beginning, the difficulty was that there was no finalized version of the Owner’s Manual from which we could understand the structure of the file. Initially, there were two content chapters that we managed to assemble (see pictures below). The second challenge was that there was no time to wait for all the content to be provided. We had to deliver the design as quickly as possible since the first Air cars were already on sale at the beginning of December.

I had to make some compromises in the design:

  1. Based on what was already in place and looking at examples of the Owner’s Manual from our competitor Tesla (since I knew that the same contractor had also developed the Owner’s Manual for Tesla), I started working with no finalized document.


  2. To speed up implementation, we decided to put the long read of the PDF file (which we would have received from the contractor) on the right and the navigation menu on the left. This would speed up the work of software developers and solve the issue of converting all the information for the Android system of the car. Technically, we decided to create an iframe web, which would open our PDF file in the browser.


I designed the UX page of the Owner’s Manual with a presumed information architecture that consisted of two levels of primary and secondary chapters:

After that, a content strategy was developed that contained recommendations for content structure, information reflection layouts, and the information architecture of the entire document.

Anatomy of the Page



Page layout doesn't fit digital space:

❌ The pagination is located in different places (left/right according to the physical world).

❌ Splitting the text into 2 columns makes it easier to read on paper but confuses in a digital long read.

Before

PDF file.

After



✅ Recommendation for placing text in one column.

✅ Remove pagination.

✅ Increase text size and change font and kerning, testing on users with different font sizes.

✅ Test the document's background color on users (white background similar to PDF vs. black background in accordance with the brand and design system).

Content Structure

Design Testing

After the design was implemented, issues with information architecture arose. As is often the case, the design process did not go exactly as planned.


Our contractors either did not listen or were unable to incorporate the 2-step hierarchy. The real Owner’s Manual ended up having many levels, extending all the way to the third step.

Testing revealed the following user issues:

❌ Navigating trees requires multiple interactions to go from the root to the leaf.

❌ The deeper the user goes, the harder it is for them to locate where they currently are.

❌ At this point, it was already planned to develop a search engine for the Owner’s Manual, but user testing showed that this was almost the main feature that users needed.

❌ The content pages on the right-hand side were mostly short, with no long read implemented, so the user had to tap on various subchapters in the menu to get to the desired page.

OM Navigation Menu Improvement

After identifying user issues, I began improving the OM navigation by trying different navigation layouts on our product.

Left-Left-Top:

✔️ The study discovered that having the primary and secondary menu levels on the left is faster to navigate than having all three levels on the left by approximately 17 seconds.

✔️ It was also revealed that users were not comfortable swiping through the expanded list to search for information. It would have been more convenient and faster for them to scroll and scan for the information they wanted.

Left-Left-Right:

✔️ By removing the third level completely and making it a long read on the right side, it became clear that it was hard for users to understand what to expect at the end of the chapters. They had to scroll through the entire chapters to see their content.

Left-Left-Top Right:

✔️ Users had an issue distinguishing the first and second levels of the menu. To separate the levels, a gray background and font were used to generalize the second level, thus highlighting the chapter of the user’s location.

✔️ Placing the Table of Contents (basically a level 3 structure) at the beginning of the content area on the right helped users easily understand what to expect next. Incorporating this information into anchor links helped accelerate information scanning speed by 9 seconds.

FINAL INTERACTION (0:30 min)

User Testing

I led qualitative user interviews, iterating on the design with the PM and Engineer in between. Users appreciated the simplification of the menu structure and found it easier to understand where they were when searching for information in the OM. Additionally, compared to the initial version, the speed of finding information improved, which is the main metric, as users typically use the OM in critical situations when something is broken or it is unclear how to interact with the car.

“I like that it’s very simplified and it gives you basically just the information that you need. I would also like to see the search engine in the OM.”


- Jack, Service Team

“It became easier for me to scan the chapters in the menu, and the information on the side helps me understand the content of the subchapter.”


- Adam, Technician, Driver

Mobile Responsive

An Omni-Channel Experience: Mobile Responsive

During the implementation and detailed consideration of case studies and different scenarios of product use, it became clear that the product should go beyond the vehicle and be available not only on the main screen inside the car but also on other platforms. This will significantly improve its usability.

Owner's Manual on Mobile Device

Just the Beginning...

The development of the Owner’s Manual is just the beginning of the ambitious Digital Help Center project. While working on the OM, my product manager and I contacted many departments of the company (the Service Center, the Department for Training Video Production for the Service Team, the User Portal Team, and the team of technicians). Everyone showed great enthusiasm and interest in participating in the new project. We collected materials that can be strategically used in the Digital Help Center, as well as side projects developed by other teams that, for some reason, did not go live. I am very enthusiastic and positive about continuing to work on this completely new project – the Digital Help Center.

'Lucid Air is the story of California — the glamour of Hollywood and the innovation of Silicon Valley.'

Solution and Results

1. Owner’s Manual Information Architecture
By improving the product information architecture, the result of finding the right information inside the document was improved by about 17 seconds.


2. Digital Help Center
- Digitization of the Owner’s Manual and its subsequent upgrade to a full-scale Help Center will strengthen the user's confidence in Lucid.


- It will reduce the cost of a printed OM by ~$850,000 by the end of 2022, as well as the cost and burden on the company's Call Center.

Learnings

2021 was a year of rapid experiments in the product that was new for the company – the Owner’s Manual. As a team, we committed to launch fast solutions to get fast learnings and iterate. We were constantly interviewing users at UX Buck to see which experiments were successful, and which failed. When the design was coming close to development, we already knew what to improve next.

Personally, I learned how to do user testing on the product inside a car, to make a clickable prototype in Protopie, to work and create a design system in Figma, and how to translate the design into Arabic that was new both for me and the company as it reads from right to left.

‍


Key Take Aways:


1. Be Fast: Since the first iteration needed to be implemented faster, I had to work and test everything very quickly at short notice, and then test again and improve. I think the speed helps you improve the product faster and figure out which solution is not working as quickly as possible.


2. Think out of the box - Think broader! Initially, the plan was to design a digital pdf version of the Owner’s Manual. But after working through user scenarios and collaborating with service, user profile and car technicians teams, it became clear that the project could grow into a full scale Digital Help Center product with all supporting materials for the user. And this is the next step for the product.


3. Be Useful. As we tested the prototype on users inside the real car, it became clear what was important to users and what was left to our imagination. Engaging the user in product development is the most important part of the designer's role!

Sati Taschiba | Product Designer

Based in Mountain View, CA

Email

LinkedIn

Portfolio © 2025

Sati Taschiba | Product Designer

Based in Mountain View, CA

Email

LinkedIn

Portfolio © 2025

Sati Taschiba | Product Designer

Based in Mountain View, CA

Email

LinkedIn

Portfolio © 2025