Helping people tow things easier
Our client Horizon / Tekonsha wanted to radically innovate off of their existing P3 Prodigy towing product line and invent a newer low-profile way for people to tow things. They had made “the thing” but they needed a companion application and user research to instill confidence
- Role
- Designer
- Year
- 2017
Approach
We built a mobile application from the ground up, focusing on some key use cases the client and their customers needed- modifying trailers, setting their brake controls, and controlling their brakes on their trailer. We ran user research with towers and usability research on the application itself and produced a large specification for the app which is available today.
Result
The Tekonsha Edge is a first-of kind brake controller that removes physical controls from a previously limiting and constrained interface and puts more control through the tower’s smartphone. View it On Tekonsha’s Website . Lessons : This project was an early lesson in keeping design simple enough for execution. The application itself didn’t entirely meet specification upon execution, and unfortunately came out the other side quite clunky, perhaps due to technical limitations. This impacted user experience in a negative way, which is a bit unsettling for an application that’s used on the road. The app also needed to be designed for visibility. Since this was being used on the road, buttons and numbers needed to be large enough to read and press, similar to the original analog design of original brake controllers. We needed to create a match between the application and the type of interface towers were already used to.