Industry Type:
Automotive

My Role:
Project Lead, Human-centered Design Specialist, Creative facilitator

Duration:
4 months

AN OVERVIEW

Being a top contender in the engine supply area, the 103 year old company has built great trust with its customers. Having said that, Cummins is still an early adopter of the digital space and is trying hard to make the much-needed shift from its traditional methods to some digital ones. In an effort to understand and empathize better with their customers, they are trying to expand their horizon by practicing some human-centered design principles to solve problems.

WHY THE HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN MINDSET?

Driving more innovative, customer-centric solutions

Helps you get to the core of the problem and reframe it

Helps inspire new, creative ideas

WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO SOLVE?

How might we drive customers to take action in order to generate value through digital notifications?

THE CHALLENGE AND OBJECTIVE

Although Cummins (or CMI) has a well-established relationship with its customers, the digital interfaces that support these products still need some work. Fleets usually suffer some downtime before they can be assisted off the road to fix. Truck companies are far more comfortable while following their traditional methods of problems solving. Which brings us to the core of the problem here, that the stakeholders are not adopting the warning notifications/service updates (or closing the loop) related to engine health the way CMI anticipated.
Our objective was to find out:
  1. What is the prime reason for them to act on a particular service notification?
  2. How do they perceive the value or disruption of acting on a notification?
This data would help us understand:
  1. How we could help fleets unlock uptime value from our digital solutions?
  2. How we can help them act and adopt service notifications?

PROJECT PHASES

01

Planning

Narrowing down the research objective, project timelines, and potential customers visits and agenda

02

Research

Understanding existing data, making an interview guide for in-person customer visits to create user personas

03

Ideation

Making meaning of collected data, identifying the overlap, facilitating a design workshop to ideate solutions

04

Prototyping

Created mid-fidelity prototypes of final ideas and leveraged storyboarding to present for user validation

DESIGN WORKSHOP HIGHLIGHTS

During my time at Cummins, I was given the opportunity to become a certified Human-Centered Design Practitioner after a training by Luma Institute. This training taught me some ideation methodologies that I was able to put to good use during a design workshop for the team to come up with a broad range of solution ideas to tackle our problem.

Methods used:
1. Personas
2. Rose, Thorn, Bud
3. Affinity Mapping
4. Creative Matrix
5. Importance/Difficulty Matrix
6. Storyboarding of scenarios

WHAT DID THESE METHODS HELP US CONCLUDE?

Feasible and easy to achieve solutions that would help cater to the needs of the stakeholders

Broad set of ways, beyond digital prototypes that help in better adoption of service notifications

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

⚡️ 4 months of being on my toes, loving every bit of the design process.
⚡️Learning through the many challenges and curve balls thrown at me, and coming up ways to tackle them all.
⚡️ Always felt welcomed and supported through the internship and the team.
⚡️ Far too many light-bulb moments during customer visits and gaining a deep understanding of the automotive industry.
⚡️ So grateful for this opportunity and industry exposure and real design process.
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Thank you for reading! 🥳

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Closing the Loop