Ford Spot
Designing internal navigation solutions for employees and visitors at Ford.
It became one of the catalysts for Ford's larger $60M investment in workplace experience. Multiple product teams spun out after it shipped.
Ford has around 40 buildings in Dearborn and 200 worldwide, and employees couldn't find the people, places, or things they needed inside them.
As part of Ford's campus transformation initiative, I led research and design on a mobile tool for internal navigation. Interviews with 10 employees across 3 regions turned up the same pain points every time: locating and booking meeting rooms, building access, indoor navigation, parking.
A value-versus-difficulty matrix narrowed that list to one build: point-of-interest search, room booking, and building access. The team named it Ford Spot during a sketching session. Testing the MVP ahead of a company trade show showed employees only cared about the building they were in or headed to next, so the flow flipped from feature-first to building-first.
We kept iterating on qualitative and quantitative feedback after that. Ford Spot surfaced real pain points around campus navigation and other workplace needs, well beyond what the original research had scoped.
Home leads with the building an employee is in or headed to, not a feature list. Nothing they pick turns out to be unavailable where they are.
Location detection surfaces nearby Ford buildings automatically, so employees don't have to search for them.
Point-of-interest search and conference room booking shipped first. Those were the two pain points that came up most in interviews.
The dashboard remembers recently viewed buildings and rooms, so returning to one doesn't mean searching again.
"Most employees didn't care about a feature. They cared about the building they were already standing in."
