How I helped shape navigation and ADAS experiences across multiple brands within Volkswagen Group, balancing safety regulations, brand identity, and real-world driver behaviour.
CARIAD is the software entity behind the Volkswagen Group's unified vehicle operating system, responsible for a platform that ships across brands with distinct identities and user bases. My work covered two tracks with very different starting points.
Structural diagram: Two-stream project scope
The central tension: the same feature had to work across brands with legitimately different requirements. My ownership covered routing and settings — two areas where brand conflicts were most acute.
Rather than jumping to screens, I started with behaviour, understanding how drivers interact with routing in real use. For ADAS, close collaboration with engineering was essential before any concept could be designed.
Process flow: End-to-end from discovery to handoff
Decision framework: How each design decision was evaluated
To make the design reasoning concrete, here is a simplified reconstruction of one feature I worked on — the flow that takes a driver from a live traffic alert to an accepted alternative route. The visual style and interaction details differ from the production version, in line with what I can share publicly.
The navigation features I contributed to are now deployed in production vehicles on the road in North America and Europe across multiple VW Group models.