Bose Automotive incorporates a cohesive and robust design system to maintain component and token building consistency among internal design and development teams as well as off-site OEM partners.
Bose Automotive provides a variety of proprietary audio features and technologies that span multiple product lines and vehicle types. Teams interact on a daily basis, but they need a common source of truth to maintain quality and consistency at all phases of development and design.
By addressing challenges faced by internal teams and OEM partners, Bose Automotive fosters better collaboration, facilitating smoother workflows and fostering stronger relationships with key stakeholders.
Users benefit from a more consistent and cohesive experience across Bose Automotive's products, resulting from the implementation of a standardized design system. This consistency enhances user satisfaction and loyalty.
Bose Automotive, renowned for its commitment to audio innovation, faced a critical challenge in its design and development processes due to the absence of a centralized repository for dedicated resources. Internal teams grappled with issues ranging from inconsistent taxonomy and component duplication to brand application disparities across iterations.
These challenges resulted in inefficiencies, rework, and significant bottlenecks in production schedules, adversely impacting delivery timelines. Compounding the issue, OEM partners encountered similar hurdles in their collaborations with Bose Automotive.
Recognizing the urgent need to address mounting manufacturing costs and production difficulties, Bose Automotive embarked on a transformative journey towards establishing a single source of truth within its design and development ecosystem.
However, the complexities inherent in managing multiple proprietary technologies across diverse product lines presented formidable obstacles. To navigate this multifaceted challenge, Bose Automotive partnered with us to explore and adopt a strategic approach characterized by incremental progress. Understanding the need to tackle the problem systematically, we initiated a process of conceptualizing a design system proof of concept.
This initial step aimed to provide invaluable insights into the intricacies and scale of the overarching project, laying a solid foundation for subsequent endeavors. By breaking down the complex task into manageable segments, Bose Automotive embarked on a journey of innovation and collaboration aimed at revolutionizing its automotive sound UX.
We conducted a series of strategic and collaborative actions, Three team discovery sessions, each distinct in nature, were conducted, accumulating six hours of invaluable insights. These sessions served as a platform to delve into team dynamics, goals, and challenges, fostering understanding and cohesion among team members.
Through synthesizing both internal and external touchpoints, a comprehensive understanding of the project landscape was achieved, encompassing key interactions, stakeholders, and influential factors shaping the project's trajectory.
Building upon this foundation, we structured a plan for a design system proof of concept, delineating clear objectives, scope, and timelines. This blueprint guided the project's initiation and progression, ensuring alignment with overarching goals and resource optimization.
Concurrently, competitive benchmarking exercises were conducted, enabling a nuanced understanding of industry standards, trends, and best practices. Leveraging insights gleaned from benchmarking, we facilitated product line discovery sessions, enhancing the project's early-phase objectives.
In tandem with strategic planning and research efforts, an information architecture (IA) flow was crafted to inform the proof of concept, ensuring logical organization and user-centric navigation. This IA framework served as a blueprint for organizing content, features, and functionalities, fostering clarity and usability for end-users interacting with the design system. Together, these actions reflected a holistic approach to project management and development, rooted in collaboration, research-driven decision-making, and user-centric design principles.
Greg worked with our internal teams to understand our needs—even when we didn't. He helped us organize our product needs and provided a level of communication and expertise that exceeded expectations. His prototyping skills are on point.
—Robert Warden, Senior Business Design Lead at Bose
Part of the early phases of design were focused on card sorting exercised based on understanding the complexities of product experiences, how they translate to different organizations, and how they could be prioritized within a system. We were able to establish a series of Product lines, experiences for each, and associate technologies associated with those experiences.
Following discovery, we sourced existing design systems from direct and indirect competitors to understand options in hierarchy, navigation and visual structure. This provide an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of design systems and learn how to identify features that promote (1) Effectiveness, (2) Efficiency, and (3) Satisfaction.
Once we understood how to approach and prioritize our MVP needs, we were able to create an IA model to inform early phase wireframing based on navigation hierarchy and a focus on product line experiences.
After constructing mid-fidelity wireframes in Figma and validating objectives, I developed a high-fidelity prototype in Webflow to match our design comps.
This featured a variety of hover states, video embeds and scroll interactions to make the prototype look and feel like a functional design system during our evaluative testing phase.
I placed emphasis on the following pages for the proof of concept (view in desktop environment):
Technologies / Centerpoint 360
