HMI Design for vehicles: Interaction beyond screens

Designing interactions for Seat’s vehicles made me re-evaluate what I knew about interaction design, and what it really means to design beyond screens.

A different industry

Before Seat, most of my work had been in startups and digital products, where you can ship an idea in a week and change it the next day. The automotive industry works on a completely different scale. Projects run for years, software lives inside hardware, and every decision passes through engineering, safety, legal and brand teams before it reaches a car.

It came with its own specificities and necessities, and a vocabulary I had to learn from scratch. Understanding how the industry works was the first part of the job, before I could design anything for it.

Every industry has its own rules. Learning them is part of the design work.

Interaction beyond screens

By convenience of the current state of the market, most interaction designers focus on websites and applications. That is where the jobs are, and it is easy to start believing that interaction design means designing screens.

Working on a car showed me how narrow that view is. There is a whole world of interactions with completely different contexts. When you are driving, the screen is not the centre of your attention, the road is. Every interaction has to work in a glance, with one hand, at speed, while something far more important is happening outside the windshield.

In a car, the best interaction is often the one you barely notice.

Interaction design is about the context people are in, not the device they are holding.

Designing within regulation

In the car, design meets regulation. How long a driver can look away from the road, what can be shown while the vehicle is moving, how alerts must behave: many of these decisions are not open to taste. They are defined by standards and law, and the design has to work inside them.

At first it felt like a constraint. Over time I saw it as a framework that made the work clearer. Regulation exists because the consequences are real, and designing within it expanded my understanding of design as a responsibility, not only a craft.

Constraints are not the opposite of design. In the right context, they are the brief.

Design has consequences

Working in a car made something obvious that is easy to ignore on a website: our work has a gigantic consequence in the real world. A badly placed button in an app costs a conversion. In a vehicle, it can cost a driver’s attention at the wrong moment.

It also showed me how much power design has over behaviour. Through design decisions it is possible to suggest, to invite, and even to manipulate how people act. The same tools that keep a driver focused on the road can be used to pull their attention away from it.

Every design decision shapes behaviour. Knowing that is what makes it a responsibility.

Beyond screens, beyond the car

Seat changed how I look at every project since. I no longer start with the screen. I start with the person, where they are, what else is competing for their attention, and what the consequences of each decision could be.

The experience expanded my understanding of design, of regulation, and of how far interaction design really goes.

Interaction design was never about screens. Screens are only where most of us happen to practise it.