Unified Autonomy Platform
Year
Oct 2024 - ongoing
Role
Sr. Product Designer at Aurora
Team
2 designers
1 UX researcher
1 PM counterpart
Multiple eng leads
Product goal
Establish a flexible, scalable, and centralized workspace that supports the core workflows of all Autonomy engineering teams.
Since the company's inception, teams have embraced creating one-off, scrappy standalone tools to support their specialized use cases.
Turns out, most teams were creating very similar applications but in slightly different ways. Rather than sinking continued resources into this wide and chaotic network of one-off tools, our product team banded together to brainstorm a way to unify them together with a vision of scalability, consistency, and flexibility.
The challenge is, how can we consolidate tooling in a way that still supports each team's niche use case?
Design deliverables
We started by creating a jobs-to-be-done framework. By clustering these jobs into abstract user actions rather than tools, we were able to identify and validate a group of standard Autonomy UX patterns that captured the majority of any tool that we had created or planned to improve.
We consolidated workflows and paired as many taxonomies across various engineering teams as possible and validated our patterns with various use cases. These patterns became the starting point for our new design system for Autonomy UX tooling.
What resulted was a vision deck that we pitched to our cross-functional team. Citing less engineering investment on duplicate tools, to establishing standardized patterns for plugins that facilitated a myriad of data sources, our vision transformed the roadmap for 2025 for our internal tool suite into a consolidated Autonomy Platform.
Previous state
Designs
Design artifacts and process
