Patrick O’Malley

📱 Product: the Additional Driver feature allows Nissan owners to grant, revoke, and customize vehicle access for friends and family across web and mobile. 🎯 Who it’s for: qwners can choose different settings, set speed boundaries and customize permissions, allowing each driver a unique experience in their vehicle. This feature is available to all vehicle models and can be found in the Client Portal and the app. There are two types of users: • Primary Driver: the person who owns the vehicle and can add Additional Drivers. • Additional/Secondary Driver: the person associated with the vehicle and invited/added by the Primary Driver. 👩‍💻 My role: I was the sole designer overseen by a UX Director. I led the end-to-end design for 8 months, owning user flows, initial concepts, and high-fidelity prototypes. I worked closely with 2 developers, 1 visual designer, 1 content designer, and synced with external US teams for cross-regional parity. 💡 The bet: the challenge was distinguishing an owned vehicle versus being added to a vehicle as an additional driver. My initial thought was to have separate flows, treating it as a feature within your profile. We veered away from our initial thinking due to secondary drivers aka ‘additional drivers’ permissions. So we ended up treating it as a vehicle itself. By adding shared vehicles into the main vehicle dropdown, we created a mental model where access meant ownership. ⚠️ Top Constraints • We didn’t have a native notification center within the Client Portal. I had to design a notification button to handle invitations. The compromise was that it was viewed within a vehicle dashboard users didn't actually own. • Both drivers were required to have profiles created in the vehicle's physical head unit. I had to bridge the digital portal and the physical car. • Due to technical limitations, we couldn't verify email or phone inputs in real-time. A single typo could break the invitation loop. 📊 Outcomes: the additional driver feature is still pre-launch but we considered the following to measure success: • Invitation Completion Rate: percentage of sent invites that were accepted. • Discoverability: tracking CTRs on the notification button to see if users found the entry point without a traditional notification center. • Switching drivers: tracking primary drivers switching to their shared vehicle. ✂️ What we cut • We deprioritized individual feature toggles in favor of a group permission to reduce backend load. • We cut the save contact ability due to legal and API limitations. Users had to re-invite a driver for each new vehicle • We also cut the ability to move a driver from one vehicle to another for the same reasons as above. 🧠 Lessons Learned • Bridging the digital portal and the physical car taught me how to balance visibility with contextual relevance. • This project tested how the Client Portal scaled, and the relationship between profiles, permissions, and vehicle dashboards.