OnStar Guardian
Leadership + Product Strategy
I started as the Product Design Lead supporting the OnStar Guardian mobile app from concept through production delivery.
Over time I transitioned to leadership. I scaled the team to 14 multi-disciplinary designers, researchers and writers who owned the production and visionary design deliveries for OnStar’s suite of products, services, and tools.
OnStar Guardian Opportunity
Through a partnership with Boston Consulting Group and General Motors Global Innovation team, we incubated the OnStar Guardian app to answer the question:
How might we extend OnStar’s promise of Safety and Security to more vehicles, to help more people in more situations?
The Research
OnStar has a loyal customer base and strong brand recognition. We conducted empathy interviews with non-GM customers as well as new and existing OnStar subscribers. the learnings proved OnStar’s brand leadership in the safety space and the opportunity to capture a larger audience by providing a more flexible and approachable product.
“I love feeling protected by OnStar in my Chevy and with I could have the same feeling in every vehicle I’m in.”
Core Beliefs
Leverage OnStar’s core services:
Crash Detection, Emergency Advisors, Roadside Assistance
Accuracy + Reliability
Increase OnStar’s reputation of accuracy and reliability through mobile phone sensors
Enhance OnStar
Create new ways for customers to leverage OnStar’s safety leadership and expertise.
Early Expressions
The first home screen designs aimed to surface OnStar’s three main services. Blue Button Calls, Roadside Assistance, and Emergency Calls.
Family Sharing
Before launch, product added a new requirement, the ability to share the Guardian app with up to 4 family members or friends. This aimed to increase overall adoption and penetration based on research with OnStar customers who were parents of teenage children.
This would introduce not only complexity to the application’s design and functionality, but lead to downstream implications yet to be fully understood.
Map as Home
Family Sharing created a need to enhance the value of sharing the service with your friends and family.
Enter, the map as home.
We created a map primary interface to reinforce the core belief of accuracy and reliability of OnStar. This also allowed users to see their entire safety network at a glance.
The Digital Button Assembly
Rooted in physical form
Adding the map as the primary function on the home screen deprioritized the size and space previously used for the 3 buttons (Roadside, Blue Button, SOS) on the original concept. After exploring trays, bottom navigation and floating action buttons, the most successful iteration drew inspiration from OnStar’s legacy physical hardware.
This familiar 3-button assembly design has remained a constant across the generations of OnStar hardware for decades. Containing the Guardian buttons in a similar treatment and floating them over the map, gave the app a more immersive and airy feel while paying homage to OnStar’s history.
Product Launch
After 2 years of development, hundreds of iterations, tests and design refinements, OnStar Guardian launched on June 2020.
OnStar Guardian showcased proof of a successful innovation pipeline within GM, providing a product with clear customer value, improving brand leadership in the safety space, and extending OnStar’s safety expertise to new customers and new markets.
+85%
OnStar growth (Last 3 years) $1.4b > $2.6b
$40mm/yr
Annual OnStar revenue saved (2G customers)
+167k
MAUs (March 2025)
What’s Next
Now a few years post launch and dozens of new features, stability enhancements and MVP tests completed, three opportunity spaces formed. Building upon the themes of trust and safety, these new focus areas improve OnStar’s reliability, adaptability and safety education and preparation.
Perception of Safety
Are we doing all we can to help more people stay safe?
Real-time Context
How might we leverage MC + Agentic AI to provide more accurate help?
The Red Button Problem
How might we reduce the confusion and friction during moments of crisis?
The Perception of Safety
Map interfaces are good at providing you the visual information confirming you are where you think you are, building trust that the system is reliable and accurate.
When provided by OnStar, the map gives you the feeling you are protected now and in the event of an emergency.
This creates 2 additional problems:
Increases dependency on technology to track children + loved ones location rather than building safe habits and preparations.
Decreases trust in teen/parent relationship (Life360 TikTok hack)
Real-time Context
Today, Guardian recognizes a drive vs a motorcycle ride and automatically call an OnStar Emergency Advisor when a crash is detected.
This limits Guardian’s value to those modes of transportation, limiting its overall use and familiarity in other emergency situations.
Leveraging more precise location data, gyroscope, speed and machine learning, Guardian can be more contextually aware, presenting the right data and tools for any mobility solution.
The Red Button Problem
Users are afraid to press the button.
Often, they don’t want to bother another human yet feel more protected knowing there is a human advisor always available.
This lack of engagement leads to 2 issues:
Unfamiliarity with the SOS ‘Red’ button.
Uncertainty whether their situation justifies a SOS call resulting in additional friction/confusion during an emergency.
How Might We
Provide the right tools to make everyone a safety expert?
Help prepare users before an emergency situation arises?
Integrate Agentic AI and machine learning to enhance education, situational awareness and advisor triage?
The Age of OnStar AI
Coming Soon…
The Build
To take this concept a few steps further, I’ve begun building this new safety app concept leveraging Replit, of the leading Vibe Coding/AI Application tools. This tool allows to to quickly build a POC, seamlessly integrate AI chat interfaces to test out the interaction model.
After using the tool, Ive decided to create another case study looking at improvements to AI apps such as Replit, challenging the chat based interface, and highlighting opportunities for products in this space to evolve into something even more valuable.
Stay tuned!
Revitalizing a Legacy
During my time designing for and leading OnStar Design, we transformed working relationships across design organizations, business, strategy, marketing, sales, engineering and product to reignite the OnStar brand and build innovating and reliable product pipelines across consumer facing apps and services, commercial fleet systems and advancements in safety hardware and software.
Reach out if you’d like to know more about the impact my work has had on this multi-billion dollar safety brand.
Shout out to Nathan Greenwood and Trevor Leaderbrand visual and motion design support for this concept.
Thank you to my design team and leadership partners at General Motors and OnStar that made all of this possible.
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