When usability becomes a quality issue
Volkswagen’s changing view of UX
Volkswagen no longer defines quality only by build, reliability and technical safety. Group chief quality officer Andreas Krepp says UX, software and intuition are becoming just as important to how customers judge a vehicle
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A car can work exactly as engineered and still feel broken to the person using it. That distinction sits at the heart of Volkswagen’s changing definition of quality.
Andreas Krepp, chief quality officer of the Volkswagen Group, points to a phrase he has encountered frequently in the US: “If it’s not easy, it’s broken.” The message is less flippant than it sounds. If a customer cannot understand a function or has to work too hard to use it, that can become a quality problem even when the underlying system is technically operating as intended. UX and UI are therefore moving closer to the centre of Volkswagen’s quality thinking.
Krepp considers quality as a hierarchy: safety forms the base, while UX, UI and additional comfort features sit further up. The further a function moves away from safety-critical areas, the more scope there can be to continue developing it after launch. Traditional vehicle quality was also heavily associated with questions of basic reliability: does the car work, does the seat operate correctly, are there technical faults?
But Krepp says those fundamentals are increasingly taken for granted, while software, services and the quality of the interaction between vehicle and user are becoming higher priorities. “The real competition is increasingly taking place at the top of the pyramid: in the user experience, software, services and how well a vehicle fits into the customer’s everyday life,” he explains.
That also changes what it means for a digital function – or even a vehicle – to be ‘completed’. Krepp sees advantages in the more iterative approach common in China: get functions into customers’ hands, gather feedback and improve them quickly. That logic cannot apply to safety systems, but it can work for certain digital and convenience functions.
“A comfort function does not necessarily have to be 100% perfect at launch,” he says. “But I need to understand the cause and know how quickly I can fix it.” Quality therefore becomes more dynamic. Instead of asking only whether a feature is perfect at SOP, another question becomes increasingly important: how quickly can the OEM respond once the product is in customers’ hands?
Software gives vehicle makers something that conventional product development rarely allowed: the opportunity to improve the customer’s perception of quality after the vehicle has already been sold.
A minor technical fault that requires a workshop visit almost inevitably feels like a repair, while an over-the-air update can create the opposite impression. A feature improves, an interface issue disappears or functionality is added without the owner having to do anything. Krepp sees the potential for a very different relationship between customer and product: “My car is better now than it was before, and I didn’t even have to take it to the workshop.”
That pushes the car closer to the model customers already know from consumer electronics. Market launch is no longer necessarily the end of product development; it can become the beginning of another phase in which the product continues to evolve in the field. Krepp explicitly points to smartphones as the reference: “Every few weeks, a message appears saying that an update was installed overnight and the car can now do a little more.” The ambition is to go beyond fixing bugs. Updates can also activate modules, improve functions or change how customers interact with the vehicle, fundamentally changing the lifecycle of an interface for UX designers.
At the same time, UX remains influenced by regional expectations. Volkswagen is developing more vehicles around a ‘local for local’ strategy, and Krepp sees genuine market differences across everything from road conditions and acoustics to climate and interface preferences. But he also cautions against overstating those differences, as some user expectations are remarkably universal. “Everyone wants an infotainment system that is easy to use,” he points out.
That creates a dual task for design and development teams: the underlying interaction model must be globally understandable and robust, while regional differences in behaviour, expectations and use cases can be layered on top. For UX teams, localisation should therefore not mean rebuilding the entire experience market by market, but adapting a common architecture where differences genuinely matter.
The broader challenge is to stop treating quality and speed as opposing forces. Krepp sees useful lessons in the different approaches taken by China, Germany and the US: China brings speed and iteration, Germany has a strong instinct for completeness before launch, and the US often follows a pragmatic focus on simplicity, usefulness and reliability. Volkswagen’s goal is not to replicate any one of them, but to understand which level of maturity a particular function requires before release.
For safety-critical systems, perfection remains the standard. For UX and software, a high-quality experience can also result from continued iterative development, customer feedback and fast over-the-air updates. That shifts UX/UI beyond a matter of aesthetics or usability to become a measurable part of the product’s quality promise.
