ProtoPie is a prototyping tool that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and many more companies are using around the globe. It was growing in influence in the mobile prototyping market. But we didn't stop there. We wanted to explore the possibilities of other vertical markets other than the mobile prototyping market, which we have been doing well in the past. I joined ProtoPie to achieve this ambitious goal.
The CEO, sales representative, engineer, and me, the four of us gathered together to think about which vertical markets we wanted to target. We set and filtered the following criteria among many industries.
By classifying into these criteria, we selected Automotive, Smart Retail, Smart Home (IoT), Digital Kiosk, Travel, Film, Health, and AR/VR industries. The automotive market was the most rapidly growing in recent years among them. As the industry shifts towards electric vehicles and autonomous driving, the in-car experience has become more important. We already had some automotive industry customers where we could easily make connections.
Automotive companies were using ProtoPie for a reason. ProtoPie was the only tool that supports communications between prototypes, hardware integrations, multi-touch, real-time voice recognition, media controls, and runs on Windows and Android devices.
The communication between multiple devices with a display is crucial in automotive experiences. Unlike mobile devices that only have a single display, two to ten displays are equipped in a car such as Cluster, CID (Center Information Display), HUD (Head-Up Display), Side Mirror Display, CDD (Co-Driver Display), Steering Wheel Display, and RSE (Rear-Seat Entertainment).
Source: car-ux.com
Automotive companies not only design user experiences inside cars but also seamless experiences with drivers outside their cars. For example, a user can turn on the car at home and set the temperature in advance with their smartphone. It’s also essential to test communications between displays and hardware such as steering wheels, pedals, and buttons.
The level of complexity for making and testing automotive user experiences is great that designers and engineers often struggle with. It generally takes a much longer development time than the mobile industry, and all automotive companies want to shorten this cycle.