mahindra
inspiration for innovation
Mahindra’s UXDNA initiative was an 8-week foundational program designed to establish a customer-centric vision for Mahindra’s Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) future. The project aimed to create a scalable innovation platform that would deliver emotionally engaging and technologically advanced experiences, setting a new benchmark for how Mahindra interacts with its customers throughout the entire vehicle lifecycle-from awareness to advocacy. The initiative was grounded in research, customer journey mapping, and the development of key personas to ensure solutions were rooted in real user needs and behaviours.
Challenges
Bridging Digital and Physical Ecosystems: Integrating seamless experiences across both digital and physical touchpoints proved complex, especially as customers increasingly expect unified, connected journeys.
Diverse User Expectations: Catering to a wide spectrum of customer archetypes (e.g., Mitali, Akash, Rahul) required solutions flexible enough to address varying needs, from tech-savvy urbanites to family-focused users.
Evolving Brand Relationships: Moving beyond traditional car ownership to foster ongoing, adaptive relationships with customers-transforming them from mere consumers to active brand advocates and users.
Internal Misalignment: Ensuring all departments aligned around customer needs, rather than defaulting to technology-led or siloed feature development, was a significant organisational hurdle.
Ownership and Governance: Lack of clear ownership across departments threatened the continuity and consistency of the customer experience vision.
Solutions
Customer Archetypes & Journey Mapping: Developed detailed personas and mapped comprehensive customer journeys, identifying critical moments to be that shape emotional connections, such as 'Connect & Bond' and 'Driving for Pleasure'.
Emotional Design Focus: Designed features and interactions to evoke specific emotions-curiosity, confidence, awe, playfulness-making experiences memorable and differentiated.
Service Engagement Blueprint: Outlined a holistic engagement plan covering every stage of the customer lifecycle, ensuring touch points from discovery to advocacy were addressed.
Personalised Interactions & Immersive Technologies: Introduced features like signature sounds, user memory profiles, AR-HUD, dynamic LED lighting, and performance modes to tailor experiences and delight users.
Strategic Experience Framework: Implemented a value vs. effort prioritisation matrix to evaluate and select innovations based on customer relevance, business value, and feasibility.
Tiered Innovation Roadmap: Adopted a horizon-based approach to innovation, balancing immediate needs with long-term visionary goals, and using hypothesis-led validation to test concepts before full-scale development.
Organisational Alignment & Governance: Recommended the creation of an Innovation Council to oversee the UXDNA vision, ensuring cross-functional collaboration and structured decision-making.
Observations and Learnings
Customer Experience is Holistic and Ongoing: True differentiation comes from designing for the entire customer lifecycle-not just feature delivery but fostering long-term relationships that evolve as user needs change.
Emotion as a Differentiator: Emotionally impactful moments-those that surprise, delight, or reassure-create lasting brand value and customer loyalty.
Indirect Stakeholders Matter: Value is created not only for drivers but also for passengers, family members, and even broader communities, expanding the brand’s reach and relevance.
Adaptive, Inclusive Processes are Essential: Success depends on organisation-wide responsibility, with adaptive processes and governance structures that support continuity and learning, rather than one-off initiatives.
Balance Technology with Real Needs: Avoiding a purely technology-driven approach ensures that innovations solve genuine customer problems and deliver tangible value.
Governance Drives Continuity: Structured governance (e.g., an Innovation Council) is critical to maintaining alignment, managing change, and celebrating organisational success.
Customer experience is a long-term game and a responsibility of the whole organization, not just the design team. Success is dependent on continuity, not one-off initiatives.
