Lime Hardware

Making the scooter and bikes feel as polished as the app—across sight, sound, and touch

Team
Role	Design Lead, Head of Design
Date	2020 – 2023

Highlights

Extended design beyond the app—partnered with Lime Hardware to shape every on‑vehicle touchpoint, from paint and displays to stickers and sounds.
Created a cohesive, multi‑sensory system that aligned sight, sound, and haptics so riders feel one continuous Lime experience.
Drove cross‑functional collaboration between Brand, UX, and a newly expanded Hardware team (boosted by Uber’s Jump acquisition).
Set foundations for Gen 4 scooters: new livery, iconography‑driven display, and a unified sound library now queued for global rollout.

Context

Lime’s playground is vast: consumer and enterprise software, purpose‑built hardware, and fleets in 100 + cities. In early 2020 we absorbed Uber’s Jump Hardware group—suddenly giving us deep industrial‑design chops and a treasure trove of IP.

The mandate: “Make the vehicle feel like the app.”
If the digital Lime already felt coherent, the scooter had to match—visually, audibly, and tactiley.

Challenge: Turn every touchpoint into one cohesive ride experience

Give riders consistent information on speed, battery, and zones—on handlebars and in app.
Craft sounds that help riders and city dwellers, not annoy them.
Ship decisions that will live on 100 k+ vehicles; mistakes aren’t easily patched.

Researching colorways with participants and testing color samples

Approach: Embed, co‑create, iterate

Deep embed with Hardware – Joined weekly critiques; UX, Brand, and Hardware functioned as one squad.
Livery & Materials – Rider‑tested colorways; Brand lead Jane Chung signed off factory paint in China for quality control.
Display 1.0 (“Wedge”) –
- Shared Lime iconography; abstracted speed/battery.
- Field feedback: riders missed numeric speed → lesson learned; hardware mistakes scale fast.
Display 2.0 – Added digital speed readout, kept abstract battery, used e‑ink for power savings (ships 2025).
Sound Design – Hired Karl Sadler. Crafted ~30 language‑agnostic tones in a Bristol studio sprint—unlock, start, fault, low‑battery, etc.
Sticker System – UX‑led ownership; modular multilingual sets crowdsourced from 150 + markets; prototyped to ensure first‑time riders launch in < 15 s.

The first Gen4 scooter prototype and the Wedge display

Prototyping display concepts for user testing and an example of one of the concepts we explored

In the studio, working on the sound design

Sticker prototypes and testing for acceptance with users

Output: A cohesive hardware toolkit ready for scale

Gen 4 livery & materials library.
Handlebar Display 2.0 spec + icon set.
Lime Sound Pack (30 production‑ready cues).
Global sticker playbook with translation workflow.
All assets fully documented, rider‑tested, and approved for phased manufacturing.

Outcome: Positioned for a smoother, safer, more branded fleet

Pilot scooters show higher first‑ride success and fewer support tickets.
Cities praise quieter alerts and cleaner curb‑appeal.
Cost‑down targets hit without sacrificing premium feel.
Full rollout across EU & US in 2024, impacting > 150 k vehicles.

Reflections

Hardware is a series of one‑way doors—validate early, sweat every sense, and keep software, brand, and hardware at the same table. Seeing (and hearing) these bikes and scooters take the streets has been a career high.