Woven by Toyota
Weaving the future
Company:
Toyota
My Role:
UX/UI, Cross-Platform
Year:
2023-Present
Overview
Woven City is an experimental smart city in Susono, Shizuoka Prefecture in Japan. It is an initiative developed by Toyota, designed as a real-world environment for testing new technologies and services. I was contributing to the early development of Woven City since 2023, working on complex internal products, collaborating closely with product and engineering to not just design and refine existing experiences, but actively figuring out what future UX might look like at the scale of a city - very unique experience for me.
4 years
to build a city
300
initial residents
2000
future residents
Woven City App
Woven City App (link to Appstore) is the official city platform I have been working on during the past three years. It connects residents, workers, visitors, and inventors to projects, events, chat across the city. It's Key Features are:
Access to Latest Information
Stay up-to-date with real-time news and notifications about Woven City.
Connect Through Events & Projects
Discover a space where “Weavers” and “Inventors” meet (online and in person). Join events, contribute to projects, and collaborate through chat and comments to create the future of the city.
Manage your everyday life in one place.
Use a single app for essential services like payments, household information, and getting support from city
The product is driven by a cross‑functional team of product managers, engineers, designers, researchers, writers, accessibility specialists and urban planning experts. Here are some key characteristics of the Woven City design practices:
End to End UX
Working on UX across the entire product lifecycle—problem framing, research, flows, prototyping, validation, and developer handoff. Focused on clarity, and measurable outcomes.
Design System
Designing within large-scale design systems and actively improved them—refining components, interaction patterns, and documentation to ensure consistency and scalability across products.
Kaizen Culture
Finding friction points in user experience and turning them into incremental, measurable improvements. Prioritizing step by step iteration over big rewrites to continuously elevate product quality.
Multi Platform
Designed cohesive experiences across web, mobile, enterprise platforms, and connected devices (React, Flutter, ServiceNow), including AI and Slack-integrated workflows,
Payment & Transfer
Challenge
Designing a high-trust money transfer flow under strict security, system, and real-world constraints.
What was my role
Redesigned how payments are structured and used, improving card, balance, and transaction history views while introducing new send and top-up flows. Defined the end-to-end experience, including system states, edge cases, and error handling, in close collaboration with engineering and payments teams:
Initiation (send flow)
Authentication (biometric confirmation)
System feedback (push notifications)
Post-transaction visibility (payment details)
Solutions: Money & Heuristics
In finance related flows, small interaction details have a big impact on how confident people feel. I focused on a few simple principles that make it easier to see what’s happening, recover from mistakes, and trust that every change to the balance is intentional.
Transparency
Explicitly surfaced who you’re sending to, from which balance, and the exact amount in a single, high‑contrast summary screen.
Predictable Errors
Defined UX for insufficient balance, network timeouts, duplicated taps, and server‑side validation errors.
Post action Trust Building
After a successful transfer, both sender and receiver see a consistent pattern: updated balance, a confirmation state, and a history entry so they can verify what happened later.
Progressive Disclosure
Used progressive disclosure: users first pick the recipient and amount, then see a clear “final check” state before committing.
Edge-case support
Worked with engineers to keep failure messages specific and actionable (“Your balance is now X; you need at least Y”) instead of generic “Something went wrong”.
Immediate feedback:
Real‑time balance updates so users can clearly connect their action with the exact change, reducing uncertainty about whether the transaction actually went through.
Microinteractions
Microinteraction can make financial flows feel more empathetic. By animating the numbers changing, we were giving clear, visual confirmation of the action. It reduces stress because it removes doubt, showing the user right away that the money was added. It makes the app feel more responsive and humane.
Results
After the redesign, we saw top‑up completion rise from about 75% to just under 90%, and the typical time to finish a top‑up dropped from a little under 40 seconds to around 25 seconds. Payment‑related support tickets about top‑ups went down by roughly a third, which matched what we heard in feedback sessions: people described the new flow as ‘safer,’ ‘more predictable,’ and said it was easier to see exactly what was happening to their balance at each step.”
Designing for multi‑role access
Challenge
It’s one app and one city, but people don’t all see or do the same things. The challenge was to design a single interaction model where different groups of people share the same features but with role‑appropriate visibility and actions that still feel coherent.
What was my role
Designed the interaction model for role‑based access in Woven City App, so different groups of people in the city could share one product while seeing the right level of information and actions. I Focused on how user roles affect the core city surfaces—news feed, projects, events, communication and translated high‑level policy and operational requirements into consistent UI behaviour. This included mapping role capabilities, defining visibility patterns for content, and aligning with product, engineering, and city teams so the model would scale as we added more users and features.
Result
Within two quarter period the multi-role access model was in daily use across city communication: visibility, chats, targeted notifications all relied on the same access patterns. In research sessions and internal reviews, stakeholders called out that messages were “reaching the right people” without feeling spammy, and that it was easier to reason about who would see what. Engagement in project communication and city announcements grew alongside an expanding weekly active user base, without splitting Woven City App into separate products.
Accessibility
Challenge
As the product grew, accessibility decisions were made incrementally across different features. Over time, this led to inconsistencies—unclear labels, uneven reading order, and interactions that didn’t always behave predictably for screen reader users. The bigger problem wasn’t individual bugs—it was inconsistency. Core flows worked visually, but for VoiceOver users they could feel noisy, repetitive, or hard to navigate.
What was my role
I contributed to the UX side of an accessibility pass, working closely with accessibility specialists and engineers. Together, we reviewed a 40-issue audit, aligned on priorities based on real user impact, and translated findings into concrete design decisions.
My focus was on:
naming and labeling patterns
screen structure and reading order
simplifying interactions for screen reader users
Approach
Rather than treating the audit as a checklist, we grounded decisions in how people actually use assistive tech. Reviewing real user feedback revealed common issues: unclear or missing labels, repetitive navigation (“button, button, button”), disrupted reading flow, and poorly described critical actions.
We also examined ARIA usage alongside industry data, which showed that misused ARIA often creates more problems than it solves.
This led to a shift in approach:
simplify instead of patching (less ARIA, more native semantics)
design for structure, not narration (clear grouping, logical order, meaningful headings)
improve clarity at the source (intent-based labels, remove redundant announcements)
apply targeted visual fixes (e.g., contrast improvements)
Result
Accessibility improvements came less from adding new elements, and more from removing ambiguity—making the interface understandable without extra explanation, which led to:
26 out of 40 issues resolved
3 in progress
9 documented with constraints and future directions (e.g., user-generated alt text)
Core flows like Home, Projects, and Chat now have:
clearer, more consistent labeling
improved navigation for screen readers
more stable and predictable interaction patterns
Just as importantly, accessibility is no longer treated as a final check. It’s now part of how we design and build features from the start.
Beyond Woven App
Over the past years at Woven City, I’ve also been designing other core products beyond the resident app, focusing on tools that enable city operations at scale. Due to NDA restrictions, I'm unable to share detailed project information, screenshots, or design artifacts. However, my recent work has included:
BtoB/Enterprise SaaS platforms design
ServiceNow Product & Interaction Design
AI Conversational Interfaces
Custom Illustrations & Visual Storytelling
Working with large Design systems
UI guidelines & standards
Information Architecture
Cross-functional workshop facilitation
User Research
At Woven by Toyota, research is plays a huge role. Most features go through validation—whether it’s quick usability testing, A/B experiments, or direct conversations with users. This helps to make decisions early and avoid unnecessary complexity.
We combine interviews, usability sessions, and product data to understand both behavior and intent. Internal tools support this process even in privacy-sensitive environments, allowing us to gather meaningful insights and keep improving continuously.
Usability Testing
UI Evaluation
Scenario Testing
In-depth Interviews
Behavior Analysis
Accessibility Testing
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