Nexar is a dashcam companion app — continuous driving memory, incident capture and a lightweight experience that stays out of the way.
The app had to do almost nothing on the surface. Drivers plug in, drive, and forget. Everything interesting — clip curation, incident detection, sharing — happens behind glass.
The design challenge was the moments when the app does need a driver's attention. We wrote a whole interaction vocabulary around "ambient" vs. "acute" alerts to make sure urgency was legible without being startling.
How we worked
Driver research was a specific kind of field study — I spent ten days riding shotgun with taxi and delivery drivers in two cities. Half the time the phone stayed dark. The other half, it did something minor: a notification, a battery alert, an update. The insight: the app is used almost entirely in the minutes around a drive, not during it. That reshaped the information architecture — the home screen is for before-and-after, not live status.
The ambient/acute split came from one editing session watching footage. Ninety percent of what the camera sees is uneventful — the road, a turn, another car. The other ten percent is the reason the product exists: a crash, a near-miss, someone backing into the bumper. I wrote a rule that every UI element had to declare which side of that line it lived on. Ambient: quiet, peripheral, no colour. Acute: loud, central, red. Anything that didn't fit cleanly into one of those two, we cut.
The sharing flow was where the product had to work in its worst minute. Someone just got hit; the phone is shaking. I designed the share sheet for one-handed use with cold fingers — three taps from the clip to an email to the insurer, plus a signature-and-timestamp stamp that makes the clip admissible. Real users went through that flow in the first month, and the thing they wrote to us about wasn't that the product worked — it was that the product stayed out of the way.
What shipped
- Background trip recording with cloud-backed incident detection
- Incident library: detected events, automatic clips, manual saves
- Sharing flow: send a verified clip to an insurer or third party
- Trip history with map and event markers
- Camera pairing, settings, account
Closing note
A product that has to be invisible most of the time and instantly useful in the worst minute of someone’s day. Most of the design effort sits in that contrast.