GOING ELECTRIC - COMPACT MACHINES

Overview

By mid-2020, Volvo Construction Equipment launched a range of electric compact excavators (EC15 to EC27) and wheel loaders (L20 to L28), starting to phase out the diesel engine-based development of these models.


Stating The Problem

As a company, this was a crucial step to reduce the ever so important environmental & sustainability impact, reducing waste and emissions as well as replacing fossil power with sustainable energy sources to reduce the overall carbon footprint.


The Users

The focus was on various sizes of dealerships as well as contractors with roles such as machine technicians, site managers, fleet managers and above all, their operators. The machines are small and can just as other 3-5 ton conventional machines be used for multiple types of construction work such as grading, trenching, lifting etc.


My Role & The Work Process

I was leading the UX work for the compact excavators (ECR25d electric and conventional) but also supporting the compact wheel loaders with UX/UI related tasks. My responsibilities included collaborating/negotiating with the stakeholders in the different platforms, empathizing with the customers of our products, defining the problems, ideating solutions, creating wireframes, designing prototypes, collecting empirical data (user tests) i.e. end to end work across the whole design process. I also learnt more about programing (QT, qml) since I have always had an interest for coding ( have an understanding of HMTL/CSS & some javascript). Furthermore, I acted as mentor and led junior designers in the same project since we employed more UX/UI designers. The work was done in a multi-cultural Scrum-team at the department of Volvo Group Design.


Results

The launch of the electric compact excavators (EC15 to EC27) and wheel loaders (L20 to L28) was indeed fast phased and successful. We released the machines on time even with obstacles like Covid. However, the leason learnt from a design perspective was that fast launches are not always the best. Sometimes it is good to give more time to be able to iterate the development process so that we truly achieve the very best for our customers, even tough the reality with time constraints can be pretty challenging. Today, I am proud to say that the machines can be reserved on Volvo CE's website: https://www.volvoce.com/global/en/our-offer/emobility/