The future of UI design for embedded systems

It’s time for embedded user interfaces to catch up to the rest of the world.

We already know this, since you can’t read an article or go to a conference without someone saying “our users want their smartphone experience in their car and on their fridge!” The allure of blending powerful features and beautiful user experiences comes too easily, and embedded systems often are found lacking.

So why are we falling behind and what market forces are driving us to catch up?

With less power comes more responsibility

There’s a common belief in the sliding scale of hardware-to-UI-capability ratio, in the sense that the smaller the platform, the less you can do with the UI. While true in a strictly functional sense—if you don’t have 3D hardware acceleration, you can’t use 3D hardware acceleration—it’s often the case that the application architecture, graphics library limitations, and suboptimal performance result in embedded user interfaces that look like this:

Instead of this: