FTUE: The Tesla center screen isn’t meant for engaged driving

A UX evaluation of the Tesla Model 3’s user interface, and how a quadrant based design could potentially improve usability

Elon Musk has integrated a digitally centered design approach to the automobile. Every ancillary action a car can perform will live inside the digital screen, located by the front-center of the interior. All of the physical controls of a normal traditional car: the radio, climate control, and other key features have been transformed from knobs to digital buttons (with the exception of the steering wheel interface). There’s a screen, akin to a tablet. The tablet’s interface is laid out pretty familiarly; with a navigational menu on the bottom, it has the appearance of a tablet application. But what trade-off to the driver does having a digital screen present compared to physical buttons, when actively engaged while driving a car?

Source. An extended mobile app navigation bar for driving.

The center screen of a Tesla model 3 presents a pretty familiar interface. It looks heavily inspired by current and modern mobile/tablet design principles. The icons are easily recognizable, and can be learned rather quickly. The map is touchscreen manipulable.

Despite the seemingly intuitive user interface, There’s one problem.

How is someone supposed to use this when actively driving a car?

Imagine this scenario, you’re a new owner of a Tesla Model 3, and you can’t engage automatic driving. You are actively staring in front of you, outside the front windshield as you drive on a busy street. You want to change the music station. You traditionally reach for a knob, but can’t grab onto anything because physical knobs and buttons don’t exist in a Tesla 3. You try to look at the screen, but realize that the buttons are too small to select while driving. You’re stuck using the steering wheel interface or speech commands because you can’t rely on haptic feedback via a physical apparatus.

The small size of the buttons make it harder to navigate when driving. Passengers can engage with the buttons, and if they visually scan long enough, the icons make sense. The interface is a direct copy of what already exists in a mobile/tablet UI, but doesn’t revolutionize the experience for driver specific use. If a digital screen is going to serve as a replacement to the analog dashboard, it needs to provide the same level of feedback for users, despite having more features and flexibility. Currently, the digital dashboard for the Tesla is insufficient for engaged driver use. Until their driver-less capability becomes more regular, the digital dashboard remains unusable for an engaged driver.

The Quadrant Design Recommendation

Providing constructive criticism is always easy. But coming up with new concrete design recommendations is tougher. But given the different capabilities and flexibility we have within the digital screen, there is potential to make it more usable.

There are various components on the bottom menu, each serving important functions within the car. One way we could potentially fix this interface would be to split the screen into four giant quadrants. The map could live within those four quadrants; the quadrant’s icons don’t need to be taking up all the digital real estate.

The quadrants wouldn’t be visually represented in a grid like that, instead, it would be superimposed onto the normal Tesla interface. From there, a unique interaction could open the quadrant into a Tesla feature. Each quadrant would be a category of features, much how each feature (climate control, music) in the current design is represented on the bottom menu with each button. The interaction to open each quadrant could be a two or three finger press. It would be easier for a driver to press on the upper left, right or bottom quadrants. Since the button to open each feature is represented by a giant tile, it would be easier to select each quadrant compared to the current design, where the bottom navigation bar has smaller buttons to interact with.

The features the designer could put into each quadrant could be decided based on a prioritization exercise done by user research. Climate control might be a top user priority, alongside radio, map and car status. Research techniques like the max diff or ranking could be utilized to see which features are really important, and should set the default screen.