“Range anxiety is real.”

– User from research session

For Google Assistant Auto’s Electric Vehicle Charging features, I updated the voice and interaction design for finding charging stations, to offer filter suggestions when stations are in range, but the user’s presets excluded them.

I delivered all prompting, including error, retry and failure prompts. I also delivered golden utterances and recommended  phrases and keywords to update grammars and speech models. Finally, I made recommendations for later improvements (P1s and P2s) to allow users to rapidly re-filter search results when they don’t find what they’re looking for.

EV Charging is complicated. Cars vary by plug type, but most can use any station with an adapter. Charging stations vary by plug, rate of charge (fast or slow), and payment method (many!). These are preset for users saying “Take me to the nearest charging station.” If no preferred stations are nearby, or the battery has insufficient range to reach one, a generic error message played: “Sorry I can’t help you right now.”

Working with the product team I updated the design to make previously screen-only toggles accessible by voice when the user’s presets excluded them. I designed the Assistant to instead state whether stations with plug types, payment types, and charging speeds were available when the preferred types were unavailable. This was synced to the map view as well, to make the stations glanceable.