The Crisis of App Quality

When I started out, the Mobile app was at a critical moment. Due to recent changes in vehicle architecture the App was dangerously unstable, ownership across teams was fragmented, and it was primarily perceived as a remote control for the car. Its potential to be a way to make a user love their Volvos "For Life" had not yet been realised. Immediate reliability problems competed with the need to prepare for new cars and future capabilities to be delightful.

Set direction on repair while building "For Life" vision with app as center.

I led the UX organisation, established experience and product direction, and connected design, product and engineering. My responsibility included developing designers and managers and shaping working practices that brought customer insight into product decisions. I worked across research and business leadership to connect those decisions with what teams could deliver incrementally.

Building a culture obsessed with user value & quality

I helped App & Car teams focus on the everyday journeys that customers depended on: locking their car, setting climate, charging on the go and vehicle status. This helped designers and peers re-imagine their products as experiences that would occur over time and place.

Through deep collaboration with product & engineering partners, we established a quality baseline. This included features, metrics and the minimum lovable experience. We also enabled thinking on what new and delightful experiences we were missing. This set up a dual-track in our approach - quality baseline, improved new offers.

Repositioning Mobile app

I helped connect the app’s direction to the wider ownership relationship, including services, commerce and retention. The work linked long-term business ambition with experience decisions, so new capabilities could be considered as parts of a connected product rather than separate additions.

As a result, the Mobile App gained a more strategic place in overall company strategy - enabling a vision of "Volvo for Life".

Preparing App for sustained scale

I strengthened the design organisation through hiring, developing designers and managers, and introducing principles, rituals and ways of framing work. These helped design contribute earlier to problems and product decisions, while giving teams enough shared structure to collaborate across disciplines.

This work contributed to the foundations for Volvo Cars App 6.0, its largest redesign and release in more than four years. It brought the car and its key functions into a more coherent experience, prepared to support a broader range of vehicles and ownership needs.

Evidence & attribution

During the wider product transformation, global MAU increased from 1.6M in May 2024 to 2.4M in December 2025: a 50% increase. Reported year-over-year MAU growth was 28%. Customers used the app on approximately 9 of every 28 days, and app-related customer-care cases fell 60% year over year.

These outcomes reflect many teams’ work. My role was to lead UX and help establish the experience, organisation and collaboration behind that progress. The December 2025 endpoint follows the end of my Head of UX tenure in October.

Reflection & Learning

My biggest learning has been that difficult things take time, patience and empathy. It took time to bring people together, see common goals and objectives, ride wave after wave of change.

My biggest reflection has been to keep humans at the forefront - be it the user, or our teams. By creating direction, a stable foundation, a feeling of progress - we were able to create something beautiful and lasting.

What is it?

A shared experience framework for translating the ambition of “premium” into qualities that Product, Design and Engineering can recognise and act against.

What are we trying to achieve?

Move beyond premium as an abstract brand ambition toward clearer experience qualities — intentional, coherent, effortless, expressive and trustworthy — that can influence product decisions and execution.

What is it?

An Experience Definition that frames a customer situation or opportunity before it becomes a collection of features or requirements.

What are we trying to achieve?

Create shared clarity around the problem worth solving, the intended experience and the capabilities required — giving teams a stronger starting point for discovery and investment decisions.

What is it?

A customer-experience view of future software development that looks beyond individual tickets and features.

What are we trying to achieve?

Help teams look further ahead, connect software investment to coherent customer experiences and strategy, and describe future releases as meaningful product stories rather than collections of functionality.

Find the opportunity before the solution

Product Labs established an important principle: don't begin by falling in love with an idea.

We started by exploring opportunity and problem spaces — looking for intersections between user value, business value and emerging technology, then turning assumptions and unknowns into hypotheses we could test.

Work through uncertainty with evidence

The Product Labs playbook was hypothesis-driven and people-centric.

Once we found a promising problem, we explored different ways of solving it and tested the experience with real people. The questions became progressively more concrete:

• What is valuable to solve?
• What experience makes it great?
• Can we get people to use it?

Scale the playbook into an innovation system

Product Labs provided a practical DNA for moving from opportunity to experiment to pilot.

As Product Labs became part of the Innovation Arena, we carried those principles into a broader question:

How could Volvo systematically explore uncertain opportunities without creating an isolated innovation function disconnected from the wider company?

The work expanded from the mechanics of experimentation toward the operating model around it — how opportunities were prioritised, how multidisciplinary teams formed around missions, how decisions were made and how learning returned to the organisation.

A good “no” can still be innovation

Not every exploration should become a product.

An experiment could create value by identifying an opportunity, influencing strategy, generating reusable knowledge — or demonstrating that Volvo should not invest further.

The important outcome was better evidence for the next decision.

Turn organisational complexity into a shared story

The Innovation Arena model involved strategy, opportunities, missions, teams, governance, experimentation and learning.

We made that complexity tangible through Opportunity Islands — a visual metaphor of oceans, islands, missions and exploration.

Workshops, visual tools and a board-game-like model helped people discuss and shape how the system could work together.

01 · Dating

Make Premium worth wanting

Premium needed to sit at the heart of the Free experience without overwhelming listeners with generic upgrade messages. We worked toward contextual upsell: connecting a benefit to something a listener was already trying to do.

That might mean taking a playlist offline, removing advertising or shuffle restrictions, playing on demand, or choosing higher sound quality. The question was how people could enjoy Free while naturally discovering why Premium might make their own listening better.

This shifted the work from isolated growth tactics toward a more contextual Freemium relationship.

02 · Proposal

Make saying yes easy

Once someone wanted Premium, choosing it needed to feel simple, trustworthy and reliable. Behind that moment was an increasingly complex commerce system: countries, payment methods, Premium products, commercial offers and partners.

Our team helped create a responsive checkout connected to Spotify’s commerce platform. Partner checkout models also allowed telcos and other brands to host parts of the purchase journey.

The design challenge was to make those different paths feel like one clear Spotify experience, with enough confidence to commit.

03 · Commitment

Design life with Premium

Conversion was the beginning of an ongoing subscription relationship. Our responsibility extended into managing plans, updating payment details and helping people keep access when payments failed.

Premium also had to fit different lives and markets, including Student and Family plans. The work moved beyond a purchase funnel toward the customer lifecycle: what people needed before, during and after becoming subscribers.

Plan management and payment experiences belonged to the product relationship just as much as the initial offer.

04 · Staying together

Keep earning the relationship

A subscription has to keep earning its place. Our team’s work extended into retention, churn prevention, winback and Premium campaigns.

Seasonal, always-on and regional campaigns brought different offers into the same relationship. Spotify needed to feel consistent globally while remaining relevant to local markets and moments.

This work crossed product UX, growth, commerce and brand. Spotify’s evolving expression mattered: a campaign or return offer still needed to feel recognisably part of the product people knew.

Running already had rhythm. Could Spotify understand it?

I helped create Spotify Running from scratch: a listening experience connecting a runner’s movement, musical energy and Spotify’s catalogue.

The opportunity was not simply to make a running playlist, but to explore an experience responsive to movement and context. The introduction above shows the product in motion.

Prototype the feeling, not only the feature.

A responsive music experience had to feel effortless while coordinating complex inputs behind the scenes. Timing, transitions and feedback mattered to the feeling of the experience.

This story complements Premium: one shows sustained leadership inside a commercial system; the other shows focused product invention and interaction craft.

Nike’s digital destinations brought together strong stories and products, but their interactions and visual language did not always feel connected. One Nike brought commerce, brand, NikeID and Nike+ into a more coherent system.

My contribution sat within that larger programme. The challenge was to make individual product experiences work as part of the whole, rather than treating each destination as a separate design problem.

The Product Detail Page was where storytelling, product information and buying met. My focus included repeated interaction-design explorations as the page evolved.

The archive shows the work in progress, not a single definitive screen. It captures how the product story and the practical choices of shopping had to share one page.

Early Mobile Web concepts were also part of my focus. They asked how the same product experience could carry across a different screen and context.

The desktop and mobile studies show that relationship directly: one product, with its story and purchase choices expressed across devices. These are early concepts, rather than a claim that every version shown shipped.

A digital brand is expressed through what people can do as well as what they see. My work with Nike explored that meeting point between a strong visual identity and an interactive product experience.

The Nike+ brand archive shows product storytelling living alongside benefits and paths into the wider experience. The work belongs to a broader team effort; these selected screens show the digital craft and context around my contribution.

Nike+ Hyperdunk technology measured aspects of performance. The Basketball Dunk Showcase turned that capability into a participatory challenge, inviting players to share their dunks.

I worked on the surrounding digital experience, not the underlying hardware. The interesting design territory was how a sport story could give people something to take part in, with interaction carrying the campaign beyond a single message.

Nike+ Basketball All Access brought campaign content into the connected product. A mobile-web experience within the Basketball app connected the community to professional events, answers and exclusive content.

It was a collaboration across Nike Brand, Nike Digital Sport and R/GA. For me, it shows how brand work could become an ongoing part of using a product, rather than a separate destination visited once.

Nike+ Web / Platform brought FuelBand, GPS SportWatch and Nike+ Running activity into a shared destination. My work included iterations on Dashboard, Profile and Activity.

The challenge was larger than a dashboard: multiple products needed to contribute to one understandable view of an athlete’s activity. Alongside hands-on design, my responsibility grew toward helping maintain coherence across the platform.

Nike+ Move used the iPhone 5S motion capabilities to make everyday movement visible through NikeFuel. I worked on interaction explorations that translated activity into an experience people could understand.

The app presented a small set of movement insights. This was collaborative work across Nike, Apple, R/GA and Synapticats; the archive connects the final visual approach to earlier interaction studies.

The NikeFuel / One App project explored bringing separate Nike+ experiences into a unified application. It was exploratory and unrealised, not a shipped product.

We used design fiction, including imagined web and store pages, to make the possibility discussable. My explorations included a modular navigation model around a feed, profile and sport interests. The image shows that proposed future, not an implementation outcome.