Land Rover Dual Screen Infotainment

Automotive HMI

The infotainment system is designed to maximize efficiency and minimize driver distraction, enabling safe multitasking while driving.

The Challenge

Reimagine the in-vehicle infotainment HMI that now offers twice as much display space and deliver meaningful benefits to the users.

The Outcome

A modular and dynamic system that optimizes driver and passenger interactions with the HMI, ensuring efficient and simultaneous enjoyment with minimal disruption.

The Experience

You recently bought a new Land Rover and want to explore its capabilities. You plan a long road trip from Mumbai to Ladakh, a Himalayan foothill area, to drive on the world’s highest motorable road and navigate challenging terrains.

You’re ready to embark on your epic journey with your wife. You load the car with luggage and gear, start the engine, and head out of the city, navigating the busy traffic while excitedly discussing your plans.

As soon as you hit the highway, the car smoothly picks up speed, and you both feel calm and relaxed after packing for the hectic couple of days. While you monitor the map, your wife plays her favorite album from the infotainment HMI and sets the seats on massage mode, setting her mood for the drive.

Time flies, and despite your dinner stop being just a few kilometers away, the low fuel warning on the display shows you’ll make it. So, you decide to continue and refuel at the stop.

After crushing 2500km, you arrive in Ladakh. The scenery is incredible, the views majestic, and the terrain perfect for testing your new machinery.

The journey continues on winding mountain roads. The car has handled everything smoothly, but soon you encounter a river crossing that requires changing the vehicle’s terrain response mode.

From the HMI, set the terrain response system to Water mode, which is best suited for this situation. The car easily passes the patch.

Your skills and the car’s ability successfully transport you and your wife across the river. Content with the experience, the car earns your trust and wins your heart forever.

The Design Process

This infotainment system is one of the first dual-screen HMIs in passenger cars, delivering a better experience for both driver and passengers with minimal driver distraction.

Advanced technology in newer Land Rover vehicles provides drivers with rich information and detailed inputs to alter vehicle behavior, making it challenging to manage traditional single-screen HMIs and potentially causing driver distraction.

This problem led to the idea of expanding the display interface on the dashboard. Land Rover cars implemented this idea due to advanced display technologies and software infrastructure for user interfaces.

The goal was to design a platform that delivers an ultimate in-car experience that’s modular, scalable and could work with any of the Jaguar and Land Rover cars for the decade to come.

With two large 10” full-touch displays, we initially felt joy about the creative freedom. However, this joy soon vanished due to our modular plug-and-play system strategy. On the plus side, this system would significantly impact final development and maintenance costs.

Designing a modular plug-and-play system was driven by the idea of creating a universal user experience for every Land Rover and Jaguar vehicle, rather than engineering or business considerations.

We arrived at the decision designing plug-and-play system after careful evaluation of the information to be displayed and tasks to be handled on each screen and all types of vehicles it’ll go in.

We started with data from past studies on minimizing driver distraction and improving the driving experience. We realized redesigning an existing system to deliver an improved experience is not difficult, but it won’t justify the investment in the new initiative. In our new philosophy of the in-vehicle experience, we decided to focus on both drivers and front seat passengers.

Our studies had shown that many times passengers are also one of the major reasons of driver distraction.

Thanks to the larger displays, the new design supports multitasking and gives passengers space to do tasks while retaining driver information. Drivers can multitask without switching menus, for example, switching between media player and satellite navigation without losing information.

The idea of portable and multitasking was verified using some paper prototypes. We sketched some layout variation and tried to mix and match them to put together a high level information architecture of the major features.

To achieve easy multitasking across the system, we designed four views: a full-screen view, a limited view (dashboard-main view), and a mini view for almost all applications.

Most applications launch in full screen view, allowing users to access all features.
The limited view is a smaller version that appears when another application needs to stay on top while the current one is open. It’s also called the dashboard-main view and occupies the maximum space on the dashboard when only two applications are running, and this application is the primary one.
The mini-view is the smallest view of an application that can always stay on top if it must to deliver critical information.

Different media player views that show up based on different scenarios. The views adapt to show the most relevant content in that view and switches to the larger or smaller view as and when needed.

This creates a modular environment where users can access up to three applications simultaneously on the primary display, offering incredible multitasking power.

The flat information architecture, combined with a tabbed menu, simplifies and expedites drivers’ access to the applications they require. Designed to be lightweight and efficient, each app contains only the most frequently used and essential information for a seamless core experience.

The other information, like preferences set only occasionally, is moved to a common Settings app for efficient use, a clutter-free UI, and a better experience focused on the most important things.

The system level information architecture shows how users will have easy access to the different types of information and how two displays combined with the dashboard view of the primary display would empower users to do easy multitasking by having various combinations parallel information.

Since both system displays would have independent software, separate menu structures were required. This technical limitation was overcome by design.

It was important to make the system look and feel as a unified system so that users get the holistic experience of technically distributed system.

This problem was largely solved by bringing the tab bars together to form a menu hub in the middle of the system, which includes the top screen footer and bottom screen header. This conceptual model ensures users interact with the same area of the system regardless of their display. While it has a learning curve, it becomes natural after a few uses.

The most important part of any system is it’s menu structure and navigation. By keeping all the menu items, from both top and bottom displays, together this divided system is perceived by the user as a single system divided in two parts, hence improving the overall usability.

The dark visual language of the user interface harmonizes with the dashboard, preserving the vehicle interior’s aesthetics.

A high-contrast color scheme with clear affordances enhances usability.

The calming teal color on a black and blurred grey background is easy on the eyes.

Translucent gradients subtly separate menu options in tab bars from the app area, maintaining visual uniformity.

Relevant photographs effectively communicate clearly and effectively.

Components are created with different levels of translucent and blur effects, subtle gradients and light shadows that give the UI some depth which helps user understand the the interface better and improves Interaction. With so much graphic treatment going on, special care is taken to ensure that nothing is overdone and the interface looks elegant.

The working PoC was successfully completed, and the system was launched as part of Land Rover vehicles a few years later under the name Touch Pro Duo. A scaled-down single-screen version called Touch Pro was also released. An accompanying mobile app was released, and the system was extended to the sister Jaguar vehicles.

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