RYAN MARTIN —
FREELANCE DESIGN LEAD + DIRECTOR
BROOKLYN
NY
WHAT
Client: Rivian
Role: Design Lead/ Associate Creative Director/ Design Manager
Year: 2021
Design Team Size: From 1–8
Duration: 6 months
Agency: N/A / In-house
PROJECT
Bringing the Rivian Mobile app to market
OVERVIEW
Joining Rivian halfway through its ramp to launch, I was brought on to lead the mobile app to market, ensuring its quality and fitness for launch.
This included the need to reestablish the mobile app’s role in the Rivian ecosystem, rebuild the visual design language, build a new design team, define net-new experiences around Delivery, Charging and Support and refactor previous technical UX work alongside engineering and product teams.
In tandem with that, I lead the build out of the Rivian Owner Journey team from 1 to over 15 alongside a redefinition of cross-functional processes for collaboration and shared ownership; ensuring we were in a place for more strategic evolution after the sprint to launch.
01/04
Establishing the Role of the App
As the Mobile App was a committed part of the Rivian release plan, we quickly had to find an identity that helped us consolidate our position in the ecosystem ahead of launch and how we were going to achieve it. We settled on the direction of “Enabling Access” - that the app was your key, not only to your vehicle but all the critical services Rivian provided to owners such as Charging and Vehicle Service.
02/04
Bringing together a team from 0
Being the first person in the team, it became quickly apparent that we would need many hands to bring the app to market across multiple worktracks and to support numerous engineering teams.
Within the first month I assembled a small team of freelance designers and illustrators, "borrowed" designers from other teams and deeply integrated our researchers to ensure we had a small but mighty team with a shared goal of steering the app to market.
03/04
Re-setting the baseline
We had big ambitions around what a mobile app could bring the the Rivian eco-system, but the reality was we were years from achieving that. We first needed to establish a strong foundation that supported the launch of the vehicles.
Mapping out key system flows to establish “how they actually work”
Experimenting with textures, illustrations and motion for a richer design language
Testing in the prototype and vehicle “buck”
Exploring UI design through key app moments
Establishing and organizing our app architecture
Building as we design, testing as we build.
04/04
Sprinting to market
The initial planned scope for launch was extensive and documentation and technical capacity limited. I helped to set a re-focus on launch day critical features and ensuring robustness of design documentation and engineering capability. This ran parallel to the visual direction overhaul and enabled us to build an initial baseline we could scale against after launch.
The app is your first experience as a Rivian owner
Rich experiences were designed to make taking ownership more memorable and ownable.
We built an illustration toolkit, to support instruction, information and wayfinding.
Animation and texture helped elevate ambiant status
By launch the team had reached 15!
We shipped over 40 key features related to delivery, control, charging, support, service and more.
OUTCOME
A successful ecosystem launch, mobile app launch and IPO, perpetuating growing pains
The Good
The mobile was launched in-time for the first vehicle deliveries and ahead of one of the biggest IPOs ever, receiving generally positive first impressions from app store reviews, and JD Power's industry review.
We'd scaled the cross-functional teams together; including growing the creative team from 1–15.
The Less Good
However sprinting to market and growing so quickly had caused disconnect in our digital ecosystem, quality issues in our final product and cross-functional processes had yet to be established to help the team scale and work more autonomously. We also hadn't truly embeded ourselves in the Ownership experience, having no true owners during this work…
And that lead me into my second year at Rivian.
To see, hear or learn more about this project —let's hang.
