Designing the digital driver workplace for MAN's 2020 truck generation, recognised with a Red Dot Design Award
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Led UX and UI concept design for MAN's 2020 truck generation digital driver workplace, from instrument cluster to autonomous driving features.
RoleSenior UX Concept Lead, December 2017 to January 2022
Every figure and quote in this case study was supplied by its author. None were generated.
The Challenge
MAN Truck & Bus SE was developing a new generation of trucks and needed a coherent UX and UI design for the entire digital driver workplace. This was not a single-screen project. The scope covered the instrument cluster, current and future driver assistance systems, highly automated driving features, and a Driver App — all of which had to work together as a unified experience for a professional driver operating a commercial vehicle under real working conditions.
The complexity went beyond the screen. The driver workplace sits at the intersection of safety-critical feedback, regulatory requirements for assistance systems, and the operational realities of long-haul and distribution driving. Getting the hierarchy of information wrong is not a usability problem in the abstract; it has direct consequences for driver confidence and road safety. The design also had to hold together across a long development cycle and survive handoff to software teams and external suppliers who would implement it.
Coordinating that process was the underlying challenge. Function development, software engineering, management, and sales all had legitimate stakes in what appeared on the cluster and how assistance systems communicated with the driver. Without a consistent UX lead holding the concept across those groups, the design risked fragmenting into a patchwork of individually reasonable decisions that did not cohere as a driver experience.
Key Decisions
- 01
Establishing a cross-series UX lead role rather than working feature by feature
- Considered
- Treating each area of the dashboard (cluster, assistance systems, error messages, Driver App) as a separate workstream with its own design ownership.
- Chose
- Taking on a cross-series UX concept lead role that held the display concepts together across all features and systems.
- What it cost
- This created a single point of responsibility for concept coherence, which placed significant coordination load on one role and slowed individual feature decisions that might otherwise have moved faster in isolation.
The instrument cluster and the assistance system displays share screen real estate and driver attention. Designing them in isolation would have produced conflicts in visual language, information hierarchy, and mode transitions. A unified concept lead was the mechanism for preventing that fragmentation before it reached the software team.
- 02
Treating error messages as part of the core UX concept
- Considered
- Handling vehicle-related error messages as a technical output, defined primarily by engineering requirements.
- Chose
- Including error message design within the scope of the UX concept work, applying the same design language and hierarchy principles used across the rest of the driver workplace.
- What it cost
- This expanded the scope and the coordination surface, drawing UX effort into territory that engineering teams typically own, which required buy-in from function development stakeholders.
Error states are the moments when the driver needs the most reliable, legible information. Treating them as an afterthought to the main display design would have broken the consistency of the experience precisely when consistency matters most.
- 03
Documenting concepts explicitly for software implementation and supplier handoff
- Considered
- Relying on working sessions and ongoing communication to transmit design intent to the software team and external suppliers.
- Chose
- Building documentation and coordination into the role itself, with the UX concept lead also responsible for ensuring concepts were captured in a form the implementation chain could act on.
- What it cost
- Documentation work competes with design work for time, and on a project of this duration it risks becoming a maintenance task rather than a design enabler. Keeping documentation current across four-plus years of development requires sustained discipline.
On a project spanning over four years, with software implementation and supplier relationships running in parallel, undocumented design intent degrades quickly. Decisions get re-litigated, implementation diverges from concept, and the original rationale becomes impossible to recover. Embedding documentation in the lead role rather than treating it as a downstream task was the practical response to that risk.
The Solution
The delivered work was the UX and UI design for the MAN truck generation 2020 digital driver workplace. This covered the digital instrument cluster, the display concepts for current driver assistance systems, the interaction model for highly automated driving features, vehicle-related error message design, and a Driver App.
The role combined concept development with stakeholder coordination across software, management, function development, and sales, as well as direct support to the suppliers responsible for implementation. The work ran from December 2017 to January 2022, spanning the full development cycle from concept through to production readiness.
The Results
The MAN truck generation 2020 was delivered with a coherent digital driver workplace covering the full scope of the project brief. The design work received a Red Dot Design Award, one of the recognised international benchmarks for product and communication design quality.
The four-year engagement, spanning concept through implementation support, reflects a level of design continuity that is unusual in large automotive programmes, where UX input often ends at the concept phase and implementation diverges from the original intent.