Designing at Scale: HMI for the Next Generation of Volkswagen Group Vehicles
How I helped shape navigation and ADAS experiences across multiple brands — balancing safety regulations, brand identity, and real-world driver behavior — for cars now on the road in North America and Europe.
Role
UX Designer
Team
2–3 designers, embedded
Timeline
Nov 2022 – Mar 2025
Focus
Navigation HMI + ADAS
Stakeholders
Engineering, PM, Brand leads
Outcome
Deployed in North America & Europe
01 — Context
Why the Project Was Hard
CARIAD is the software entity behind the Volkswagen Group's unified vehicle operating system — responsible for a platform that ships across brands with distinct identities and user bases. My work covered two parallel tracks with very different starting points.
Structural Diagram
Two-stream project scope
Navigation HMI
Iteration on existing system
Routing interactions
Settings architecture
Multi-brand adaptation
ADAS Experience
Greenfield — from scratch
Future HMI concepts
Common design system
Safety-first interaction models
Shared constraint: patterns must scale across multiple VW Group brands
Volkswagen
Audi
Škoda
Porsche
SEAT
02 — Core Problem
It was Organizational, Not Just Design
My specific ownership covered routing and settings interactions — two areas where brand conflicts were most acute. The central tension: the same feature had to work across brands with legitimately different requirements.
Stakeholder Map
Who I was aligning across
Brand design leads
Visual identity teams
Michael
UX
Engineering teams
Product managers
Embedded across product, engineering, and design governance workstreams
Conflict Diagram
What conflicting brand requirements look like
Brand A
Routing confirmation: established flow users are familiar with
⟷
Conflicting requirements
Brand B
Routing confirmation: different model matching brand UX philosophy
Resolution: shared abstraction — one interaction logic, brand-level surface adaptation
03 — Approach
How I Navigate
Rather than jumping to screens, I started with behavior — understanding how drivers interact with routing and settings in real use. For ADAS, close collaboration with engineering was essential before any concept could be designed.
Process Flow
End-to-end workflow
01
Behavioral research
Existing data + competitor benchmarking
02
Alignment workshops
Structured negotiation across brands
03
Interaction design
Within safety & brand constraints
04
Usability validation
Iterative testing & spec handoff
Decision Framework
How each design decision was evaluated
Safety & Regulation
Distraction guidelines
ADAS level constraints
Legal requirements
Brand Requirements
Visual identity
Interaction philosophy
User familiarity
Engineering Feasibility
Technical constraints
Platform capabilities
Scalability
↓
Shared abstraction: interaction pattern that satisfies all three layers simultaneously
04 — Outcome
Deployed in Production Vehicles
The navigation features I contributed to — routing interactions and settings architecture — are now deployed in production vehicles on the road in North America and Europe across multiple VW Group models.
200+
Screens harmonized and aligned across brands
2
Markets deployed — North America & Europe
2
Parallel tracks: navigation iteration + ADAS greenfield
2.5yr
End-to-end from discovery to production delivery
Deployment Map
Geographic reach
North America
US
CA
Europe
DE
FR
ES
CZ
05 — Key Takeaways
What This Project Taught Me
The navigation features I contributed to — routing interactions and settings architecture — are now deployed in production vehicles on the road in North America and Europe across multiple VW Group models.
01
In safety-critical design, clarity beats cleverness
Every time I was tempted toward a novel interaction, the question "what happens if the driver misunderstands this at 120km/h" brought me back to fundamentals. Simplicity is not a compromise — it's the goal.
02
Alignment is a design deliverable
A decision that everyone can act on is worth more than a perfect design nobody implements. Treating workshops and documentation as design outputs changed how I measure my own impact.
03
Designing once for many is a different skill
Creating interaction patterns that scale across brands with different identities and engineering stacks requires abstraction that single-product design doesn't demand.
A note on confidentiality
Due to a non-disclosure agreement with CARIAD and the Volkswagen Group, final screen designs, brand-specific interaction flows, and proprietary research findings cannot be shared here. What I can discuss in depth — in a portfolio review or interview — is my design reasoning, the trade-offs I navigated, and the principles that guided decisions across 200+ screens and multiple brands.
← Previous case study
Smart Factory Dashboard
Bilfinger Group
Next case study →
PIDGraph — AI industrial tool
Bilfinger Group
© 2025 Michael Gibran
