TOYOTA CONNECTED EUROPE | 2025 - 2026
Designing the next generation of Toyota’s European app
Designing and evolving key connected vehicle experiences within Toyota’s European app, balancing user needs, technical constraints and a new design system.
ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
Cross-functional squads: Product, Engineering & Research
CONTRIBUTION
Led the redesign from discovery through validation and delivery
Overview
Toyota is currently evolving its European app (2 million+ users) onto a new multi-brand design system, creating an opportunity to improve not just the visual language, but also the consistency and quality of the underlying experiences.
As this work progressed, I was increasingly brought into product areas that needed clarity, structure or momentum. Teams relied on me to quickly understand complex or ambiguous problems, align the experience with the new system and help move work towards something that could confidently be moved through to delivery.
The scope varied by feature. In some areas, the challenge was to uplift an existing experience into the new design system and resolve long-standing UX issues. In others, it meantworking on entirely new features or interaction patterns from the ground up.
This case study brings together selected work across Car Theft Assistant, Climate, Vehicle Status and EV, showing how I helped turn a broad design-system transition into clearer, more cohesive and more capable product experiences across Toyota, Lexus and Subaru.
Car Theft Assistant
I took over as lead designer for the squad responsible for remote and vehicle status experiences in early 2025. One of the key services owned by the squad was Car Theft Assistant. This is a new and complex connected service designed for a particularly high-stress scenario: helping customers respond when their vehicle has been stolen.
The experience needed to guide users clearly through reporting a theft, sharing the information required to support recovery, and understanding what was happening to their vehicle and connected services while a case was active.
Behind that relatively simple user journey was significant complexity, with multiple internal teams, external partners and technical dependencies involved in delivering the service.
I mapped the full end-to-end journey to understand the experience across these handovers, including critical moments, dependencies and failure states.
Technical constraints meant the MVP experience was not going to be as seamless as we wanted. Rather than allowing these compromises to define the long-term UX, I mapped the current, interim and future states of the journey. This helped stakeholders distinguish between genuine product decisions and temporary technical mitigations, while giving the team a shared target for how the service should evolve.
A few screens related to the Car Theft Assistant feature.
Journey Mapping example of the stolen vehicle experience.
Vehicle Status
Vehicle status is another area that I was responsible for redesigning while leading this squad. This was known to be one of the most critical areas of the app, as outlined in this more detailed case study: Is my vehicle safe and secure?
Dashboard, status and status details screens in the positive state.
Climate
Climate was another area I was responsible for redesigning end to end. It is a highly valued feature, particularly for customers in extreme climates, allowing them to remotely prepare the cabin before departure or schedule climate sessions in advance.
Discovery and research had already highlighted several usability issues, so the redesign was an opportunity to address these while introducing the new design system.
The experience went through multiple rounds of testing and refinement, resulting in a simpler, more useful experience that resolved the known UX issues.
One key design decision was to bring the app closer to the climate controls inside the vehicle. I wanted the controls to feel more tactile and immediate, making the app feel like an extension of the cabin rather than a separate digital interface.
The final climate experience
Some of the research metrics and findings
Climat control iterations