How we designed an electric vehicle’s in-car interface

This year, Daimler and BYD unveiled their newest collaborative product — the Denza 500 electric vehicle.

Ming Labs had been commissioned to design the instrument cluster and head unit of the Denza 500. As a marketing intern without prior background in design or much knowledge on it, I was curious about the design processes and challenges that go behind such a massive project.

My boss, William Marks, slacked me one day saying, “Hey, I was told by the Denza guys that the car should be available in the showrooms here. Could we check and then maybe go test it out?” I was stoked. Some research and a few calls later, I scheduled a test drive at the Denza showroom in the west of Shanghai, and we headed down to experience the car first-hand.

Will and Frank interacting with the head unit

It was cool to see the design elements surface on the screens when we started up the car.

After the opportunity to experience the car personally, I was intrigued. I dug through our archive of decks and interviewed my colleagues who had worked on this project previously.

Here is a list of the people I spoke to:

1. Cem, business development manager
2. Marc, chief creative officer and co-founder of Ming Labs
3. Will, general manager of Ming Labs Shanghai and senior project manager at the time of the Denza project
4. Frank, UI/UX designer
5. Quentin, former senior UX designer

Motion design for when you accelerate and decelerate

The first person I spoke to was Cem. He explained that Daimler had approached us in 2016 with a goal to redesign the human machine interface (HMI) of the Denza.

“Our job was to optimize the logic, user flow, visual design, and user experience for the in-car interface within this rapidly developing EV (electric vehicle) market,” he said.

Step 1: Define the project requirements

The process kicked off with client meetings to get a comprehensive understanding of the project requirements. Marc explained that first meetings were always crucial to frame the design vision.

I asked him, “What is most important when setting the design vision for digital in automotive?” He explained that design for automotive, especially in the digital world, is still immature. Many people think about fancy 3D screens, absurd color gradients, and futuristic sci-fi feels when they consider digital design for cars. However, he firmly believed that meaningful design comes from a user-centric point of view.

Step 2: Customer, product, and client discovery

Step 3: Develop the concept and set the art direction

Step 4: Mood boards, information architecture, visual design, wireframes

Step 5: Communicate your ideas, get feedback, and reiterate

Step 6: Implementing our digital designs with the hardware

My key learnings and takeaways