Brilliant Car UIs From Monument Valley’s Design Geniuses

Automobiles, it has been said, will change more in the next 25 years than they have in the previous 100. Conventional cars are growing ever more efficient, electric vehicles offer ever better range and performance, and autonomous vehicles promise to make driving as easy as flipping a switch. But one thing remains stubbornly unchanged: the instrument cluster.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re driving a 15-year-old heap or a six-figure supercar. The odds are you’re getting your vital info—speed, fuel level, that sort of thing—from analog gauges that aren’t all that different from those in a Model T. Even cars that have embraced the digital dash, like the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, and otherwise groundbreaking cars like the Tesla Model S and Audi’s autonomous A7, have done little to push the form forward, relying instead upon skeuomorphism to represent an established design legacy.

Ustwo’s vision for a Mercedes S Class speedometer. GIF: Ustwo

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Automakers have plenty of reasons to stick with what’s proven—analog gauges do a great job of conveying information at a glance. “But we think it’s time for this to be challenged,” says Tim Smith, a designer with British design studio Ustwo, the company that created the amazing game Monument Valley. Smith, along with interaction designer Harsha Vardhan and product lead David Mingay, dove deeply into a conceptual project that imagines what the instrument cluster of the future might look like. You can read the team’s expansive post (and even design your own using Ustwo’s source code), but here are a few takeaways.

Context Changes Everything

The big problem with instrument clusters is there’s simply too much going on. A typical dashboard crams a lot of info into limited real estate: speed, engine RPM, fuel level, the status of various fluids and systems, and maintenance alerts. Some models have infotainment displays in the cluster as well, providing info like your direction, what you’re listening to on the stereo, and more.
All of this data is important, but not it’s not important all of the time. To declutter the interface, Ustwo used environmental data to ensure you see the right information at the right time. The designers call this adaptive hierarchy, which essentially means the data presented to you is determined by what’s happening inside and outside your car. If you’re stopped, for example, there’s little point in displaying the speedometer. “Instead, you might see how much farther you can drive on your tank of gas or how far you are from your destination,” Vardhan says. With adaptive hierarchy, your display is dynamic. Like the other gadgets in our lives, cars will learn what’s important to us and evolve based on that information.