The car knows your VIN. It doesn't know you.
I drive a lot of vehicles as part of my work in automotive research. What struck me over time isn't how bad the navigation is, or how clunky the media controls are, it's something more fundamental. Every time I get in a different car, or a colleague needs to drive the same car, we're starting from zero. Seat position reset. Climate back to default. Preferred audio source forgotten.
Driver profiles technically exist in most modern vehicles. But the experience of setting one up, switching between them, or editing preferences mid-ownership is genuinely painful, buried in settings menus designed for a parked technician, not a person who just wants the seat to remember them.
Three rules I set before opening Figma.
Side projects are where I make the design decisions I don't always get to make at work. Before sketching a single layout, I wrote down the three things the experience absolutely had to be true to. These became a filter for every decision that followed.
Sketching the flows, not the frames.
I started with four key screens, the ones where the design decisions would actually matter. Pen and paper first, to force layout thinking without getting distracted by color or type. The goal was to get the hierarchy right before touching pixels.
Five screens. Four flows. One system.
The high-fidelity pass was about making the identity metaphor tangible. Violet glow on the active driver. Warm, readable typography for preference values. A layout grid that feels like a premium vehicle HMI, confident spacing, no clutter. Every element earns its place by reducing something the driver would otherwise have to think about.
Active driver highlighted with violet glow. Preference preview on each card.
All live preferences visible at a glance. Edit access from any card without leaving the view.
Contextual tabs let drivers edit within the domain, climate, audio, seat, nav, display.
Copy defaults from existing driver to reduce setup friction. Name and avatar first, preferences second.
Modal, not a takeover. Nav strip always visible. One tap switches driver, zero interruption to the journey.
Walking through the core flow.
Four states, one journey: getting in the car, selecting your profile, seeing your preferences load, and editing one preference without leaving your context. Each transition is designed to feel like the car is responding to you, not the other way around.
The choices that defined the system.
Three decisions shaped the entire visual and interaction language of ARCA. Each one was a deliberate departure from how profile systems currently work in production vehicles.
Violet, not white. Identity has a color.
Most vehicle HMIs use neutral white or blue as their primary accent regardless of context. For ARCA, I gave the active driver a personal accent color, violet, that persists through every screen they're in. It's a subtle but consistent signal: this is your space right now. The car is in your profile. When you're not driving, violet is absent from the interface.
The loading state is not a spinner, it's a handoff.
When a driver is selected, instead of a generic loading animation I designed a named loading sequence: the screen shows the driver's name large, then lists each preference as it applies, "Seat adjusted. Climate set to 72°F. Loading audio…". This does two things: it communicates what the car is doing in real time, and it reinforces that the car is genuinely adapting to a person, not just restoring settings.
Quick-switch is a floating layer, not a mode switch.
The mid-drive driver switch could have been a full-screen takeover. I rejected that immediately, it would require the car to pause the driving experience while a new driver was being confirmed. Instead it's a centered modal that overlays the current state. The navigation strip remains fully visible and active at the top. Three driver cards, one tap to switch, one to dismiss. The car never stops navigating.
Side projects teach you to make decisions, not just execute them.
At work, I'm close enough to vehicles and user feedback to know what's not working. What my day-to-day doesn't always give me is the latitude to go deep on the design language itself, to choose the type, commit to the color, decide the motion. ARCA was that space.
What I'd bring into a UI Designer role from this: the discipline of designing states instead of screens. ARCA is four states of one product, not nine separate pages. That thinking, what does this screen look like in every state the driver could be in?, is the muscle I wanted to exercise, and the one I'd apply directly to infotainment, profile settings, or any other HMI surface.
States over screens
Designing 4 states of one product forced cleaner component thinking than designing 9 separate screens. The same layout, different emphasis. More resilient to edge cases, more scalable as a system.
The loading state is UX
I spent as much time on the "loading profile" state as on the dashboard. That transition is the moment the car becomes yours, it deserves to feel like something, not look like a spinner.
Constraint earns trust
Keeping the nav strip locked during quick-switch wasn't a compromise, it was the constraint that made the overlay feel trustworthy. A car UI that takes over the screen loses the driver's confidence. Don't take over unless you have to.