My Renault: designing a connected-car ecosystem

The problem

Most projects come to you with a deadline and a direction. This one came with neither, except it was already past its deadline before it reached our team. No design system to work from, no clear guidance on how to move forward. Just a mandate to build a car-ownership app for millions of Indian users, and a clock that was already running late.

The process

With no brief and no system, we started where we could: research. My team and I audited every competitor in the Indian market to understand what car owners here actually expected and where the gaps were. Over three months, we built a design from the ground up around the Indian ecosystem: FASTag, trip planner, fuel expense, watch design, and the everyday features Indian users rely on that competitors already had.

Then the ground shifted. Corporate handed down their own updated design system and told us to use it. The problem: it was built Europe-first. It contradicted much of what we'd designed, wasn't nearly as feature-rich as the Indian market demanded, and shipped with a very limited set of components. Features that were table stakes here (FASTag, trip planning, fuel expense) weren't even on their radar. So we had to rebuild everything from scratch on top of their system, this time with a far tighter deadline: one month for the entire app.

The hardest part wasn't the timeline, it was the absence of information. No documentation, no direction, nothing that handed us the answer. So we worked with what we had, made calls on the fly, and kept refining until the product held together.

The solution

One app, built on the European system but extended with everything it was missing for India, so owners of connected and regular cars get the same coherent experience. FASTag, trip planning, service booking, expense tracking, vehicle health, all in one place, designed for how people here actually use their cars.

Designing for how India actually owns a car

Adapting the system wasn't just restyling, it meant building for needs the European version never accounted for. The clearest example: aftersales. In Europe it's a minor touchpoint; in India, aftersales (service, maintenance, repairs, warranty) is central to how people live with their car, and often the main reason they open the app at all. That entire world simply didn't exist in the system we were handed, so we designed the aftersales features, flows, and the components they needed from the ground up.

The outcome

We shipped the full app inside the one-month window, on the mandated system, without losing what made it right for India. Since launch the feedback's been good, people specifically call out how much better it feels than the old app.

Going beyond the brief

Marketing wasn't my scope, but I care about the product, so I made the assets anyway. Seven or eight promo videos in After Effects and the Adobe suite, plus social posts, to hand the marketing team a polished starting point instead of a blank page. That's the graphic-design and motion background paying off, and the kind of thing I'll do when I believe in what we're building.