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Daimler TSS GmbH · 2018-2020
UI DesignUX DesignSketchiOS/AndroidDesign Systems
47
countries
design system adopted company-wide
Lead designer for Mercedes me Carsharing at Daimler TSS, the Connected Cars subsidiary. The product let car owners share vehicle access with friends and family. It shipped in 47 countries.
A private car sharing app for Mercedes-Benz owners on iOS and Android. Authorization flows, location sharing, guided handover instructions. The interesting problems were what happened when it had to work in 47 different regulatory environments at once.
The App
Mercedes me Carsharing let owners grant access to their car to specific people for specific windows of time. First-time users had to get through authorization, add a car, share location and hand over a key without calling anyone for help. That is a lot of flows to get right for someone who has never seen the product before.
I designed the iOS and Android experience covering the core flows: who can access the car and when, car list management, location sharing and the guided handover instructions. Lean UX meant testing assumptions early rather than building complete concepts before validating them.
47 Countries
Launching in 47 countries sounds like a distribution win. In practice it meant every market had its own regulations around vehicle access, data handling and what the app was legally allowed to do. Edge cases that would be rare in one market were standard in another.
The core flows had to be flexible enough to handle that without fragmenting into separate products. Getting that architecture right before scaling was the part that mattered most.
Working Within Constraints
Daimler restricted external tools. No Storybook, no Abstract. The standard design system tooling at the time was not available. I built a design system management approach inside Sketch using only the internal software stack.
The main Mercedes design team picked it up and adopted it. That was not the goal, but it is the clearest signal that it worked.
The Team Shift
Part of the work was changing how the team made decisions. Design sprints during events, mentoring on research methods, shifting the default from "we think users want this" to "let's check." The designers who went through that took the approach with them to their next projects.
