Polestar is a Swedish automotive brand specializing in premium performance electric cars. I am currently employed at the company as a UX Strategist and Concept Leader.

I joined the company in 2021 to help build the medium to long-term UX strategy for Polestar cars. But in the tight Polestar UX team everyone is contributing to their fullest, and in addition to my main line of work I am continuously participating in hands-on work in all ongoing car projects. Immediately after joining the company I jumped into fast-paced development process of Polestar 3 and soon after started on Polestar 4.

Award-winning HMI design

As a UX strategist, my role within Polestar 4 project was to make sure the technological capabilites of the platform developed by Polestar's parent company, Geely, are channeled into an understandable, convenient and easy to use HMI that truly enhances the driving experience and empowers users without overwhelming them with complexity. With Polestar 4 our team achieved a new benchmark for quality of the car HMI, which is widely regarded as one of the best in the industry. Polestar 4 has won the Red Dot Design Award in the User Interface category in 2023.

Red Dot Design Award - Polestar 4 HMI

Polestar 5 UX concept leader

After months of hard work on Polestar 4, I took parental leave to spend some time with my son. Upon coming back to work, I was appointed a UX concept leader for Polestar 5, the upcoming flagship model of the brand, based on the ambitious Precept concept unveiled in 2020.

Established in 1992 as Digital Illusions and acquired by Electronic Arts in 2006, DICE is a studio behind Battlefield, Star Wars Battlefront and Mirror's Edge blockbuster video game series. I came onboard the Battlefield 2042 development team in 2020.

After launching the previous game in the series, Battlefield V, the studio was seeking to expand the UX team to ramp up for the next project, and reached out to me with an offer. I joined the studio around the time when Battlefield 2042 was entering pre-production and thus had a chance to take part in the early concepting stages of the project.

Core loop area owner

Shortly after joining the studio I was appointed an area owner of the game core loop experience. This meant I had to make sure players have smooth experience when launching the game, selecting game mode, matchmaking, connecting to a game server, and later arriving back in multiplayer lobby after a round, having collected all rewards and taken in all important game stats on the way. My day-to-day work involved constant collaboration with almost all departments – from artists, animators and writers to network engineers and UI scripters. I was responsible for both macro and micro level of the core flow - from the high-level player journey to the individual interactions within every screen of the flow.

Expanding the UX toolset

My previous non-gaming experience helped a lot during my time with the UX team at DICE. I introduced a number of methods, like user journey mapping or state diagrams, which became a standard practice in the team and helped bridge the gaps between designers, developers and other stakeholders.

Battlefield 2024 - Official site

Viaplay is an online streaming service that offers movies, series and sports content for a monthly subscription fee. I joined the company as a senior product designer when I moved to Stockholm in January 2019.

My Viaplay journey started with redefining the experience for logged-out users. As the company entered transition into a new organizational structure based on product areas, I took additional responsibility to help build cross-functional agile teams.

Design for conversion

Shortly after joining the company, I took part in multiple initiatives to make the logged out experience more inspiring and encourage users to sign up. One of the biggest projects so far was launching linear TV in Denmark, where users can now add scheduled television to their streaming subscription. This project required close collaboration with product managers from Sweden and Denmark, and finding a good balance between business requirements and user needs.

Building stronger teams

During my time with Viaplay, the company underwent a major organizational change, which resulted in forming of new agile teams focusing on specific product areas. This change brought upon some of challenges: how to ensure collaboration, both within and between teams? How to create coherence and get the teams up and running? I took an initiative to help the management tackle these challenges. Starting with my team, I began facilitating a holistic, user-centric approach with minimized handovers. That meant involving everyone in all product development stages - from discovery and problem definition, through concept creation and prototyping, and into development and launch.

After an almost 6-year stint with gaming industry, I joined Volvo Cars to work at the intersection of digital and physical worlds — designing interactions with car HMI and shaping the human experience of autonomous drive.

At Volvo, I was able to employ my combined experience of being both thinker and doer — applying every appropriate method to solving a problem at hand, be it building physical prototypes, creating concepts for touchscreen, or conducting user tests in real traffic.

Autonomous drive

Most of my work at Volvo was dedicated to researching user needs and expectations of autonomous driving. The project had numerous stakeholders, both from industry and academia. Here, as part of a tight cross-disciplinary team, I was involved in all stages from formulating hypotheses, through building prototypes, to driving the autonomous drive simulation cars, gathering real-world insights and finally, to processing those insights into deliveries to vehicle projects.

Prototyping platform

The test cars my team had at our disposal provided a perfect playground for HMI and cockpit design, and I encouraged my fellow engineers to turn them into a shared resource for the entire UX centre. I wanted to enable all other interaction designers to test their concepts as early as possible in the real traffic using actual car signals — something that was lacking from the workflow at the time I joined the company. So I teamed up with several developers to create a bespoke prototyping platform based on web technologies. This platform enabled anyone familiar with HMTL or JavaScript to build prototypes using real car signals that could be tested in the driving context. The platform proved to be very versatile and its application went beyond the UX centre with people from all over the R&D showing interest and willingness to contribute. This helped not only designers bring their concepts to life faster, but developers to have a unified code base for all HMI prototypes.

Driver information & infotainment

Before joining the autonomous drive team, I worked with the infotainment system for several months. One of the projects was to redesign the interaction with vehicle functions and drive modes. I was responsible for developing early concepts for drive mode HMI for both combustion and electric vehicles on the new Android-based system. Here the greatest challenge was to simplify the interaction while keeping it clear, informative and easy to use for any Volvo customer. Even though the design went through many iterations after I handed it over, the core ideas made it to the Polestar 2 concept shown at Google IO 2019 (see 6:21 - 6:48):

Agile ways of working

Since I was coming to the automotive industry from the fast-paced, agile environment of always-online service, one of my first assignments at Volvo was to investigate tools to aid the company in the agile transformation process. Therefore a big part of my work involved promoting user-centric design methods, where rapid prototyping and user testing are less formal procedures but rather a natural part of the design workflow.

Uplay PC is a digital distribution and digital rights management platform developed by Ubisoft, which extends gaming experience by providing achievements & rewards, marketplace, news, and multiplayer services for players. I served as design lead for the project while employed by Ubisoft Massive in Malmö, after 5 years on the project as a UI designer.

This position offered me an opportunity to develop my leadership skills and ability to organize and prioritize work. Being part of the "steering committee", I helped define the content and feature strategy of the platform and was responsible for the functional and aesthetic integrity of the application. Another area of responsibility was managing the design team.

More about my work on the project:

Ubisoft is the fourth-largest video game developer, with over 40 game studios worldwide. One of these studios is Ubisoft Massive in Malmö, where I was hired as a UI designer for the Uplay PC project in June 2011.

Back then the application was a simple game launcher for PC games and Ubisoft has just launched a project to transform it into a complete digital distribution platform with an integrated store and loyalty program. The platform consisted of a desktop application for Windows, and an in-game interface providing quick access to features like in-game store, friends and chat.

Uplay PC

Initially the team was very small, therefore, as the only designer, I had to split my time between sketching, prototyping, usability testing, creating visual assets and coding the UI in HTML/CSS. As the team and functionality of the application were growing, the need for a solid design foundation was increasing. One of my challenges was to promote design thinking in a heavily engineering-driven project. However, after a major UI overhaul in 2015 proved successful, the importance of the user-centric approach became evident to everyone in the team. Eventually, the design team grew as well, but people from all areas expertise were encouraged to participate in the design process.

My typical day on Uplay could include discussing feature requests with HQ in Paris, observing user tests in the lab, talking to game development teams about ways we can support their releases, pushing pixels in Photoshop, and fixing UI bugs in an upcoming release.

By the time I left the project, the team had grown to over 50 people, with Uplay becoming a major project within Ubisoft, with apps for PC, mobile and console.

Back office

Apart from the Uplay PC app, I was involved in designing interfaces for internal tools used by game developers and publishers across Ubisoft studios. For instance, one of these tools allowed game devs to keep track of game builds, deploy them for testers, manage region-specific SKUs and publish public betas.

Goog Malmö was a charitable initiative aimed at helping people from economically disadvantaged areas in finding employment.

When I was working at Ubisoft Massive, David Polfeld, the managing director of the company and one of the creators of the Good Malmö project, approached me with an invitation to contribute to the visual identity of the initiative, having an idea of a mythical creature of some kind to serve as a mascot for the project. I was excited to take part and created a mascot based on a stylized griffin, and visual style for the organization.