Released early in 2020, Stinger's flagship head unit, HEIGH10, achieved success in its category due to its blend of cutting edge technology and user-centric design.

Integrating a large, high-resolution touchscreen with an intuitive interface, the HEIGH10 offered exceptional control over audio and entertainment functions. Its compatibility with popular audio sources and applications, along with best-in-class sound processing set it apart from its peers.

At Stinger they really like to go big, and our new product wasn't one head unit with a large touch screen but 4 different head units with wildly differing capabilities.

Stinger's in house dev team was ready to go fast and we needed something that scaled from first principles. Time to build a design system!

Stinger's customers are a diverse group of drivers encompassing extreme off-road enthusiasts, high-end audiophiles, and everyday commuters who wanted a seamless integrated infotainment experience.

After exhaustive research into market trends, consumer needs, and the capability of our existing solution, we identified a handful of ingredients that made HEIGH10 successful and were part of Stinger's core identity:

Given that we would eventually extend this software platform across multiple devices with wildly divergent screen resolutions and operating conditions, I knew that we would need a scalable design library that ensured consistency across every product we would take to market.

While other team members developed audio quality parameters and physical form factors, I began designing Stinger's Design Language System. We needed three things quickly to ensure we could design for any product our team would dream up:

Our design library made assembling multiple products significantly faster. Different resolutions and aspect ratios were simple to redesign and our componentized library meant that when a metaphor needed to change in one system, its semantic attachments were updated across our library of Figma prototypes.

Prototypes ranged from hand drawn all the way up to high-quality full system overviews and screen prototypes were used with Maze.io to test usability concerns at scale.

Beyond designing our system's fundamental design language, I was also responsible for designing a handful of integrated applications provided by outside companies, notably HD Radio™ and SiriusXM Satellite Radio. The most important goals with external applications were:

Once our DSL was ready for development, the real work of negotiating what the final product would be began in earnest.

It's all well and good to design a 'perfect' system but the reality of development is that sometimes something you designed doesn't work in actuality, something slipped past usability testing and has to be redesigned, or in some scenarios new features are added after development begins.

Continuing support for development takes many forms, but the most important part of developing our universal audiotainment platform was validating the system across a wide variety of upcoming screen sizes so that our engineering team had a clear path to the finish line.

By designing a system, we were able to quickly scale components across our product line. The next step was building screen references and component guidelines so that developers could create their own screens that fit our system's look and feel when they needed them.

Once HORIZON10 was deemed fit for the public, it endured an exhaustive battery of usability and acceptance testing in-vehicle. Stinger installed the prototypes in a wide variety of vehicles to prepare for integration testing to follow the release of our universal platform. Additionally, I took delivery of a bench prototype to begin designing the secret sauce of Stinger's audiotainment platform, our PAC Integration Suite.

Our integrated product customers are ravenous for customization, so our newest design challenge was producing a .svg vehicle library that could be recolored without adding any additional size to our UI assets. I designed an infinitely recolorable collection of .svg vehicle illustrations and passed along instructions to development to implement our new recolor feature.

The product was finished and ready to ship.

Next up was supplying Stinger's Marketing team with assets that would allow them to begin positioning our newest products in the market.

Working alongside our talented 3D Product team, I produced a variety of product images that showed our work in the best possible light. The work was featured on product packaging, the HORIZON10 product page, and many other customer touchpoints.