ESURF

ESURF the first mobility app that covers the full EV journey, from trip planning over navigation with driving assistance to real-time charge monitoring.

This app is for searching the nearest suitable charging station for e-vehicle for German users. ESURF finds charging that has appropriate charging plugin and where one can pay with their payment system. It’s important, because in Germany you can’t just pay everywhere with your credit card, there are a lot of places that use one oe another payment system.

Besides the app can inform the user about the process of charging. And it provides navigation assistance and online charging status.

And another important feature — ESURF works not only on smartphone, but also using Apple Car.

Idea & team

The idea was from my client, and we worked in very small team: product owner / client, backend, iOs develop and me (designer). The client works in big automaker and knows a lot of driving experince of target audience. All work we did remotely living in different countries.

Start with researches

Every product starts from research of course. First researches were made by client himself — he descrived the target audience: German male 40+ technology fans.

Then I had to get acquainted with all competitors of ESURF. There are a certain amount of them on appstore. The most interesting was to watch competitors that had an app for Apple Car. Because me myself don’t have apportunity to use apple car we made researches with the client, who is active Apple Car user.

The main conclusions from the researches was that existing apps don’t provide all the features, they do just one part from the whole work, and can’t help in difficult cases when you need to make complex route with several stops and you have to understand how ofthen and where you will need to charge your vehicle.

And many existing apps has not intuitive and clear UX. So one of the main issues was to provide complex information in simple way.

Wireframes

After research there came wireframes. All process was divided into steps and device used (smartphone or Apple Car).

Style search

We tried different styles, inspired by competitors, dribbble shots and starbucks ;)

But finally we came up with minimalistic yet modern look and feel. Restraint of colors is compensated by emoticons and funny messages

Resulting color palette is huge. Also dark theme palette was included.

A lot of ions were produced by me, becuse we needed suctom icons for plug types and for navigation

Final versions

Here are main screens. Main scenario is driver’s searching for charging stations depending on the destination. ESURF can not only show the route as simple navigator, but show, where the driver can leave her car for charging while doing her own business.

All main settings can be provided at the very begining or lately in profile settings. Also dark theme is available.

The special point is navigation. It’s not just simple showing where to turn the car. It also watch how much charge left and if it is possible to drive to chosen station. If the station becomes occupied by other drivers, ESURF will show another closiest appropriate station in real time. Also ESURF can plan very long routes with a lot of charging while travelling.

And of course it’s available for Apple Car. For me as a designer it was a challenge to make an app for Apple Car, because when i was working on it there were a few apps for AC. AC had guidelines but there were rather poor, so a lot of things i had to imagine or pick up bit by bit.

First launch

Before start we made a simple website with questionnaire if e-vehicle is appropriate for a user. Three simple questions and fast result, if it is more clever for one to buy EV or hybrid. No email needed to know the result. But also we provided simple instruction how to get €9000 from government to buy EV. To get it one had to leave the email.

After launching in Appstore the website was redesigned. I’ve made design and the whole working landing using Tilda Publishing

And after it API for business for made, so I had to create completely another page but still in ESURF look and feel