The Subaru Remote app aims to improve convenience for Subaru owners by focusing on remote operation and integrating with smartwatches, providing customers with an enjoyable user experience.

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ROLES
UX Director
Design Lead
Design Operations

CLIENT
Subaru Corporation
Copyright © Subaru Corporation

TEAM
Station (design and development)
Subaru Corporation product stakeholders and PM (Japan)
Engineering team

MY ROLE

UX Director and design lead. I worked directly with Subaru’s product stakeholders and PM in Japan to capture requirements, ran workshops with engineering and PM to review requirement documents and APIs, and planned feature priorities and the release schedule with PM.

THE PROBLEM

Subaru Japan had no connected-vehicle app, only an owner’s manual app. This was a brand-new build: Subaru’s first app letting owners control and check their car remotely, on iPhone, Android, Apple Watch and Wear OS.

KEY DECISION: WHAT GOES ON THE HOME SCREEN

Surveys we sent to Subaru owners by email told us they’re largely sporty, outdoorsy drivers who use their cars for road trips. So we designed the home screen around the commands they’d use most, remote climate control and vehicle status, alongside scenic imagery that fits Subaru’s lifestyle brand, and moved everything else deeper into the app.

KEY DECISION: PHASING FEATURES AROUND WHAT THE APIs COULD DO

In workshops with engineering and PM, we walked through the requirement documents and API behavior together to see what each feature actually needed. That let us split features into release phases: lock and unlock, vehicle location and status, send-to-navigation and Apple Watch shipped at launch, and remote climate control followed in a later release.

KEY DECISION: REAL-TIME LOCATION VS. BATTERY LIFE

Subaru wanted owners to see where their car is in real time. The problem: refreshing the car’s GPS position nonstop, including in the background, drains the phone’s battery and uses a lot of data. We agreed on a middle ground with engineering. The app refreshes the car’s location every few seconds instead of streaming it, and the car icon slides smoothly to each new position so it still feels live. For the map, we styled the native map to match the app’s dark theme instead of building a custom one, which kept engineering effort down.

OUTCOME

• Launched on the App Store in Japan in December 2022

• Lock and unlock, vehicle location and status, send-to-navigation and Apple Watch at launch; remote climate control added in a later release

PROJECT SCOPES + DELIVERABLES

• iPhone, Android, Apple Watch, and Android Wear

• Iconography Design

• Information Architecture

• Visual Design and Storyboard Creation

• UI Walkthrough Documents

• Screen Transition Diagrams

• Animations

• App store assets

• Marketing Automation

PROCESS