Product design question
Design a car feature that allows visually impaired passengers to enjoy the trip, such as experiencing nature, scenic roads, mountains ahead, etc.
- Tesla
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Inclusive design sense: translating a visual experience into non-visual channels.
How to approach it
- Clarify this is for the passenger, not the driver, so it's not a safety-critical control.
- Pick primary sense substitutes: audio narration and haptic feedback.
- Identify pain points: missing scenery cues, and feeling disconnected from the ride.
- Propose AI-generated audio narration of surroundings using onboard cameras and maps, plus haptic seat cues for curves.
- Prioritize audio narration first, since it's the richest available channel.
- Define success as percent of visually impaired riders who opt in and keep the feature on.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds narration in real sensor data the car already has, cameras, GPS, terrain maps, rather than a vague AI feature.
- Adds a haptic layer for curves and elevation change alongside audio for a multi-sensory experience.
- Lets the user control narration density to avoid fatigue on long trips.
- Defines opt-in retention as the success metric, since a novelty feature that gets turned off has failed.
Common mistakes
- Treating this like a driver-assist safety feature instead of a passenger-experience feature.
- Proposing only audio description without considering pacing and fatigue on a long drive.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you avoid the narration being annoying on a familiar daily commute?
- How would you test this feature with actual visually impaired users?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop