An EV car-UI to help find activities near charging stations. Walking directions + charge status sent straight to your phone.
42 minutes
EV drivers spend an average of 42 minutes at a public DC fast charger.
Apps optimize how fast the car charges. Nobody designs for the wait itself.
U.S. Dept. of Energy + Energetics, 2.4M sessions through June 2023.
1:1 interviews with EV-owning professionals 35--55 + a question I kept hearing back: what do I do for the next forty minutes?
44 + SVP Product
Drives the family from San Francisco to Seattle to surprise his wife at a work trip. Charges on arrival. Wants to walk into her hotel with bread + pastries from a bakery near the station.
→ Bakery flow
52 + semi-retired engineer
Won't sit in the car for forty minutes. Brings the dog. Wants the nearest park, the nearest trail, the nearest patch of grass.
→ Dog Park flow
38 + Infrastructure Architect
Doesn't want to do anything. Wants the cabin to go quiet + the world to come back in. Birdsong, rain, ocean, fire.
→ Birdsong flow
So I built a co-pilot for the in-between.
Tūī is a sidekick, not a chatbot. Greets you by name + breathes + blinks + naps when you're idle too long. Picks up the weight of the activity prompt so the car doesn't feel cold.
Listen + Focus + Connect + Outside + Nourish. The grid is the same across every persona. Press, drill in, confirm. Three taps, you're committed.
When you press Nourish, the card lifts + Tūī peeks up from behind it with bright yellow eyes. Tiny, deliberate. The kind of detail you don't notice until it's gone.
Tūī never sends paragraphs. Just ⚡️🔌 when charging starts, 🍞 + a location pin when the bakery's three blocks away, 🔋🔌 when the car's full. Voice: best friend who doesn't overshare.
Drag the knob + the gradient fills the track + the percentage tumbles in a vertical stack + the cabin halos in real time as your finger pulls.
I was told this was too ambitious for a UX class. I built it anyway, in 2024, with a Figma slot-machine column inside a clipped frame. Now it's real, in code. One <input type="range">, one CSS gradient, one translateY tied to the value.
“Craft over process.” -- final reflection in my Fall 2024 deck
Tūī finished as a static Figma prototype. Linked frames, animated transitions, lots of mascot iteration. None of it translated to engineers. The handoff was dead.
If I were starting today I'd build it in Rive + ship it in code from week one. The mascot would breathe in production, not just in Smart Animate. The slider would behave, not just demo. A prototype isn't a screenshot. It's a thing that runs.
This page is that retake. Same design, alive.
Tūī (the bird) is known for mimicking sounds + filling quiet spaces with melody. The iridescent green-blue plumage is exactly the gradient I picked for the mascot, before I knew the connection was there.
The Birdsong flow plays my own field recording from a 2024 New Zealand trip. That same recording is what made me want to build Lost & Endangered the next semester.
Past-me didn't know she was planting a seed.