Creating an engaging walk-through experience at the
General Motors Atlanta Dealer Innovation Lab
About
The Atlanta Dealer Innovation Lab was a space within the General Motors Atlanta Innovation Center focused on showcasing 11 important and relevant innovations projects completed by various GM teams. All concepts and projects shown within this space revolved around the customer and dealer journeys that were enriched by a GM application or a service.
I helped lead the experiential design with a few others on my team. We were tasked with the challenge to create an inspiring and engaging space meant to educate internal GM employees, dealership personnel, and GM executive employees.
My role
Experience designer, researcher
Company
General Motors
Category
Experiential
Focuses
Digital ecosystem, full product life cycle,
customer path
The design challenge
How could we transcend the small screen and create an experience that was robust and memorable in a relatively small space?
We were also tasked with creating a mobile app that would enrich the visitor experience and help guide visitors through the space. We had a tight deadline and pushed out a refined experience within three days--just in time for CEO Mary Barra and CIO Randall Mott to tour around the space. We worked closely with the lab leads, tech leads, social media teams, and VR groups.
Our team worked on:
Storyboarding for visitor flow through space
Space flow concept sketches
Designing visual and interactive touch points, such as signage and a mobile app
The process
Testing for this experiential project was a different beast than the traditional mobile or web usability
test. Through our experience we found reverting back to paper prototypes was extremely
valuable and allowed for super quick idea turnover.
For the lab, we first defined the journey steps of the visitor, dealer, and customer. This helped
define the different areas within the space, which ultimately defined the flow of the visitor app.
We then created a few storyboards to help lay out a potential visitor journey.
Then we began creating with a few important questions in mind:
How does it actually feel to use the product in this potentially fast-paced environment?
Is this space accessible to all users? Consider: users with physical disabilities.
How can we grow the experience using sharing capabilities?
How can a supplemental mobile app add, instead of detract, from the experience?
How can we transcend the small screen and create an experience that's robust
and memorable?