Pilo Autonomous Taxi — UX/UI & Branding

Overview

No driver, no surge pricing, no small talk. Pilo is a fully autonomous taxi application — and when there's no driver in the seat, the interface becomes the entire experience.

Conventional ride-hailing design can lean on the human element: the driver's name, the rating, the photo, the reassurance that someone is coming. Autonomous mobility strips all of that away. What's left is the product. Every ounce of trust, every moment of reassurance, every signal that the journey is proceeding exactly as it should — all of it has to come through the screen.

The design brief was built around one governing principle: remove friction at every step. That's not a UI brief — it's a philosophy that runs from the first booking interaction through to the moment the door closes. The task was to make self-driving mobility feel natural, trustworthy, and effortless for a user who has never done this before.

App overview — core screens and booking flow

Challenge

The primary design challenge in autonomous mobility isn't the booking flow. It's trust. A passenger who has never sat in a driverless vehicle needs constant, ambient reassurance that everything is working as it should — without that reassurance ever feeling like noise.

"Clean. Bold. Autonomous. Every decision was made with one goal in mind — remove friction at every step."

Most of the existing UX patterns for ride-hailing were designed with a driver in the loop. Remove the driver and those patterns start to fail — because they were built to facilitate communication between two people, not to communicate directly with a passenger on behalf of a system. The whole interaction model had to be rethought from first principles.

The secondary challenge was multi-platform coherence. The experience spans iOS, Apple Watch, and a landing website. Each platform has a different relationship with the user's attention — the watch is ambient and glanceable, the app is task-focused, the website is considered and persuasive. The visual system and interaction language had to translate across all three without losing its character or requiring different behaviour from the user depending on which surface they're on.

UX flow — journey from booking to drop-off

User research — problem definition

Process

Every interaction designed around a single question: what does the user need to know right now, and what can wait?

USER RESEARCH & PROBLEM DEFINITION

Mapped the full emotional arc of an autonomous journey — not just the functional steps. Identified the moments where trust is most fragile: vehicle approach, door unlock, first movement without a driver present. Each one became a design problem with a specific answer, not a generic reassurance pattern.

UX FLOWS

Designed the complete journey — booking, vehicle approach, boarding, in-ride, and drop-off — as a single uninterrupted experience. No dead ends, no unnecessary confirmation steps, no moments where the user has to think about what to do next. Every transition earns its place or gets cut.

HIGH-FIDELITY UI & COMPONENT LIBRARY

Built the full UI in high fidelity with a complete component library beneath it. Clean, bold, autonomous — a visual language that communicates precision and confidence without borrowing the conventions of competitor apps. The component system ensures consistency across every screen without making every screen look the same.

VOICE AI BOOKING FLOW

Designed a voice-first booking entry point — the fastest path from intent to confirmed ride. The visual UI during voice interaction had to do something unusual: it needed to confirm that the system was listening and understanding, in real time, without distracting from the spoken interaction. Ambient feedback over explicit feedback, at every step.

APPLE WATCH INTEGRATION

The watch is the most ambient surface in the system — the one you glance at, not stare at. Designed specifically for that relationship: status updates, ETA, and vehicle proximity communicated in one or two pieces of information at any given moment. Nothing that requires reading. Everything that requires a glance.

LANDING WEBSITE

The website operates at a different register — considered, persuasive, unhurried. Designed to establish the brand's credibility and communicate the product's value to someone who has never used it. The visual language of the app carries through, but the pacing and hierarchy are entirely different.

UI system — component library and visual language

Booking flow — interaction prototype

Screen states — in-ride experience

Voice AI booking flow — interaction design

Apple Watch integration — ambient status

Branding — visual identity applied

Solution

An end-to-end product experience across iOS, Apple Watch, and web — built around a single principle: remove friction at every step. The passenger never has to think about the technology. They just have to get in.

Pilo works because every interaction was designed with its specific context in mind. The booking flow is fast and unambiguous. The in-ride experience is calm and informative without demanding attention. The watch integration is ambient. The website is confident. None of these platforms share the same pacing — but all of them speak the same language.

Complete product — iOS app screens

App motion — transition design

Onboarding — first-use flow

Landing website — brand and product presentation

Product motion — ambient state transitions

System overview — all platforms

Brand applications — identity in product context

Complete product overview

Full product design system delivered across iOS, Apple Watch, and landing website with motion assets and developer-ready specifications documented for ongoing product development.

Deliverables completed:

User research & problem definition

UX flows — full journey mapping

High-fidelity UI design — iOS

Complete component library

Voice AI booking flow

Apple Watch integration

Brand identity system

Motion & interaction design

Landing website design

Multi-platform design system

PILO