Projects / VW Track My Vehicle
VW Track My Vehicle is a live shipment-tracking experience designed for Volkswagen Australia during my time at Katzion (a GlobalLogic company). It replaces the usual post-purchase silence with a real-time view of a customer's new car: from the port it departs to the vessel carrying it home, right down to live position, course and speed, and estimated arrival.
Services:
Challenge:
Customers had just made a big purchase, then heard almost nothing for weeks while their car crossed the ocean. A single static "estimated delivery date" wasn't enough to carry that anticipation. The wait needed to feel as considered as the car itself.
Role:
Designed the end-to-end experience at Katzion for Volkswagen Australia: the order-status flow, the live vessel-tracking map with position and voyage data, and the microcopy that keeps a multi-week wait feeling reassuring rather than anxious, working alongside engineering to surface live voyage data from the shipping line and the client team to sign off the experience.
VW Track My Vehicle
Customers who'd just bought a new Volkswagen had no visibility into their car after purchase, just a vague delivery window and radio silence for weeks while it crossed the ocean, undermining an otherwise premium buying experience.
The order-status experience gives customers a live view of their vehicle's journey: vessel position, course and speed, and milestone-based status, turning a multi-week wait into something reassuring to check in on instead of anxious about.
By the Numbers
A weeks-long wait, made worth watching.
Status: Shipped
Delivered for Volkswagen Australia during my time at Katzion.
- Live vessel position & ETA tracking
- Milestone-based order status
- Designed for Volkswagen Australia
Product Screens
Outcome
The order-status experience shipped to production for Volkswagen Australia, replacing a single static delivery estimate with a live view customers actually check in on. Voyage data - position, course, speed, and draught - that previously lived only in shipping-line systems became something a customer could read in plain language, translated from maritime data into a simple picture of where their car is right now. Milestone-based status gave the multi-week wait a shape instead of one date with nothing in between it. The result is a feature currently running in production for a global automotive brand, handled with the same care as the buying experience it follows.
Key Takeaways
- Raw data isn't reassuring by itself - vessel coordinates only became meaningful once they were translated into a narrative a non-technical customer could follow.
- Designing for a waiting period means designing for repeat visits, not a single moment; the experience had to hold up the fifth time someone opened it, not just the first.
- Working inside an agency team taught me to design experiences that a client's engineering team could build against a live third-party feed, not just a static design file.
- Tone matters as much as information architecture when the underlying event (your car is somewhere in the ocean) can just as easily read as anxious as it can reassuring.
