Rivian's latest over-the-air software update features Drive Cam, which enables the use of all vehicle cameras for recreational recording. Mike Knott, Senior Lead UX Designer on the project, shares some of the thinking and development that went into this feature.
Read the software spotlight on Drive Cam here.
“The opportunity that stood out to me immediately was that we have the capability here to record an entire drive for someone. Unlike a stand-alone camera, we have a massive battery available to us, we can just record forever.”
Mike Knott Rivian Senior Lead UX Designer
What's the origin story of drive cam?
Mike: We often storyboard our concepts before we start designing them. We came up with this idea of a moose coming out of the woods, we imagined watching this amazing animal that you see so rarely cross the road, and then it goes back into the woods. We thought, what if the driver could just tap on the screen and capture exactly what they saw in the vehicle at that moment? And then later they’re able to look at that footage and re-live the experience. This storyboard actually came to life recently when someone shared a video that was recorded from the inside of an R1T of a moose crossing the street right in front of them. We thought, wow this is a real thing!
How can you design to help people capture meaningful moments when they don't even know that they're about to happen?
Mike: We’re always recording with a buffer in the background. So, when you're ready to tap the button, we've already got a little bit of history that we can use for that. This was really important for the Incidents feature. If you were in a car accident, we could see what happened leading up to that moment. Similarly for Drive Cam, people are usually just a little bit late to hitting the record button when they see something significant they want to capture, so being able to add a small timeframe of pre-recording ensures that we captured that moment.
How does the team come together on a project like this?
Mike: Typically, there are four designers: an HMI designer that helps with technical constraints, a UX designer like myself that works on behavior and functionality, a UI designer that makes the experience pixel perfect and a content designer that develops our messaging. The four of us work together to deliver a spec to a large group of specialized engineers. It has taken a big team to get this project going. We talk about this as being an iceberg feature. The part that you can see is the very tip of the iceberg above the water, but there is so much below it that we had to think through and develop that the user hopefully never sees, things like error messaging. There's a lot more to it than what you see on the surface.
What are you most excited for with the roll-out of this feature?
Mike: You know, people could just go out and buy a third-party dash cam and put it in their R1T. But what is really unique about what we've done is that you get footage from all the cameras around the vehicle. I think that will be appreciated, that we took the extra steps and didn't just record with the front camera and call it done. We included all the cameras at the same time and made sure that they were synced. Hopefully we created something very unique. I'm really excited to see what people capture with it.
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