Unplugged
The Mobility House · eyond · 2024
A feature redesign giving EV drivers control over their charging mode from anywhere. The location constraint had frustrated users since launch. The redesign was tested head-to-head against the existing experience through moderated usability testing, then confirmed through user interviews and surveys with real eyond users.
Year
2024
Role
Interaction Design · Usability Testing
Team
Product Manager · Engineers
Platform
iOS & Android
Context
EV drivers could only switch charging modes (Flex, PV or Instant) when physically plugged in at home. Qualitative feedback was consistent: users felt the app didn't trust them to make their own decisions about their own car.
What I owned
End-to-end UX and UI for eyond across iOS and Android, working with a Product Manager and engineers. I also built the eyond design system from the ground up: the components, patterns and documentation the team worked from.
What the evidence showed
There were no product analytics, so there was no way to measure how often the constraint was actually hit. What existed instead was support volume, which flagged the problem, and a beta group of around fifteen real eyond customers available for surveys, testing and interviews. Being able to return to the same users repeatedly, rather than recruiting strangers once, is what made the evidence usable. The pattern was consistent: drivers didn't think of the app as something that operated the car, but as somewhere to state what they wanted and have the system handle the rest.
The decision and trade-offs
I redesigned the charging mode selector to be location-independent, accessible at any time from the main dashboard. The car still has to be connected to receive a change, and that part is physics. What wasn't necessary was blocking the decision itself. The app now captures the choice whenever the driver makes it and applies it when the car next connects, which turns a locked control into genuine planning: switch to Instant before leaving work, or schedule PV the night before.
The real constraint was a UX decision that hadn't aged well, not a technical one.
Locked.
Mode switching unavailable when unplugged.
Switchable from anywhere. Changes take effect on the next home charge.
Validation and delivery
I tested the redesign head-to-head against the existing experience in moderated sessions with the beta group, then confirmed the direction through interviews and surveys with the same users. The new version produced faster mode switches and more confidence, with the control living in the charging status card. I stayed with the work through engineering implementation rather than handing it off at design.
Outcome
The redesign shipped. Afterwards the support team reported fewer tickets on the flow. No usage tracking was in place, so that is a report rather than a measured change. With instrumentation I would want to know how often a change is queued rather than applied immediately, how long queued changes wait before the car reconnects, and whether ticket volume on this flow actually fell.