My unsolicited review and constructive criticism of Air UX3.0

[Solomente]

Not that anyone cares but sharing this info as I see it. I have done UX design before, albeit many years ago and for financial software. This post is long so I started with a TLDR and I tried to base my feedback on factual information. Where something is opinion/personal preference, I tried to indicate that. I'm aware this is all in reference to the UX of a luxury car, so none of this should be taken too seriously. First world problems, as they say...

TLDR: Overall performance (snappiness) is excellent and should be applauded. Love the sound improvements. Separating the pilot panel from the upper screen is a useful and very welcome enhancement. The design/UX of the upper screen should've stayed unchanged from UX2 (with minor tweaks like the dedicated AA/CP button) while the UX3 design of the lower pilot panel is generally a welcome improvement.

Pros:

• Overall performance is excellent. No stutters or hiccups when interacting with the interface. Optimizing performance is hard to get right and Lucid deserves a lot of credit for this.
• Sound quality is greatly improved (I have SSP). I don't know what they did but it's like they implemented automatic variable loudness based on volume level, and/or changed to a logarithmic volume scale.
• Music starts up automatically and where it left off, instead of never, or 10 songs back! Yay!
• Allowing the pilot panel and upper screen to operate independently gives welcome flexibility
• Pilot panel menu customizability is a great addition, allowing each owner to select most used screens in the permanent menu options
• Combining seat adjustments and massage functionality into one screen makes sense and is a smart change
• The car color/wheels matching your actual car is a fun improvement that feels more special/customized
• The top pull-down menu on the pilot panel is a good way to stash extra less-used features. It's easy to argue that some aren't "less-used" by some people -- which includes me, the serial Trip Info button presser -- but I think this design makes sense overall.
• Parking cameras seem to be less sensitive to auto-trigger when in stop and go traffic, and also turn off at 5mph rather than 17mph when they auto-trigger
• Blind spot / blinker cameras look clearer to me, especially at dusk where it's not fully dark

Cons:

This list is long not because it's more bad than good but because I wanted to explain WHY in a logical, design focused way.

Starting with the upper screen...

The Home screen and its new card design provides no useful functionality and actually removes at-a-glance Nav info and quick-launch Media functionality present in UX2. I don't see any reason why the home screen was changed at all, other than to create a dedicated AA/CP button at the top, which is helpful. In my opinion, the aesthetic design of the UX2 home screen was far more pleasing, upscale, and unique looking than the new UX3 card layout. It also didn't fight with the curved screen shape in the Air. Addressing each of the home screen cards individually:

• Nav Card
  • The original home screen showed Home and Work with estimated travel times and the suggested road you should take. This was at-a-glance without selecting anything. UX3 Nav card has no glanceable information, only allowing you to tap Home/Work which you could already do in UX2. Tapping the Nav card just pulls up the Nav screen, which is redundant with the permanent Nav icon on the left of the home screen. While driving, the Nav card shows movement that is distracting, but not large or detailed enough to provide any useful information. In summary, a downgrade from UX2.
• Media Card
  • The media card on the home screen offers play/pause and skip fwd/back buttons, which could be useful if there was any other reason to actually use the home screen. Since the Nav and Phone (see next bullet) home cards are useless, you might as well just stay on the Media screen to control media (or use the steering wheel buttons). In UX2, the home screen had icons allowing you to launch any of the last 6 stations/albums you listened to so this functionality was lost from the UX3 home screen as well.
• Phone Card
  • This card provides no information and does nothing except launch AA/CP, which is redundant with the dedicated permanent button in the top bar. The top right corner is also cutoff, showing that this new UX design doesn't even take into account Lucid's unique dash screen design language. This just exacerbates the negatives of that screen shape and in my opinion, results in a more generic looking UX that could've been designed for any phone or tablet.

• The dedicated Media screen on the upper panel is poorly laid out with lots of small buttons that could be stashed instead, like in UX2. I don't see any functional improvement over UX2, but it looks (again, in my opinion) uglier and clunkier. It does at least have the quick-launch of the last 5 stations/albums that was lost from Home screen.
• As many have noted, the new lighter color schemes from Vibes reduce contrast on the entire upper screen and while not terrible, it's another downgrade from UX2 in terms of contrast/visibility and in my opinion looks worse.
• AA and CP are harder to navigate/see in my opinion now that they stretch to the left edge of the screen.

For the lower screen, the Pilot Panel:

• The main car screen graphics are very pretty but belong on a website, not on a screen while you are driving. At a minimum, these images should have been done in a nighttime setting to darken and tone them down (more like the UX2 image).
• The Tidal app continues to be pretty bad and the "now playing" media bar is too small and at the bottom of the screen, making it harder and frankly less safe to interact with while driving

 

[gaskiller]

Not that anyone cares but sharing this info as I see it. I have done UX design before, albeit many years ago and for financial software. This post is long so I started with a TLDR and I tried to base my feedback on factual information. Where something is opinion/personal preference, I tried to indicate that. I'm aware this is all in reference to the UX of a luxury car, so none of this should be taken too seriously. First world problems, as they say...

TLDR: Overall performance (snappiness) is excellent and should be applauded. Love the sound improvements. Separating the pilot panel from the upper screen is a useful and very welcome enhancement. The design/UX of the upper screen should've stayed unchanged from UX2 (with minor tweaks like the dedicated AA/CP button) while the UX3 design of the lower pilot panel is generally a welcome improvement.

Pros:

• Overall performance is excellent. No stutters or hiccups when interacting with the interface. Optimizing performance is hard to get right and Lucid deserves a lot of credit for this.
• Sound quality is greatly improved (I have SSP). I don't know what they did but it's like they implemented automatic variable loudness based on volume level, and/or changed to a logarithmic volume scale.
• Music starts up automatically and where it left off, instead of never, or 10 songs back! Yay!
• Allowing the pilot panel and upper screen to operate independently gives welcome flexibility
• Pilot panel menu customizability is a great addition, allowing each owner to select most used screens in the permanent menu options
• Combining seat adjustments and massage functionality into one screen makes sense and is a smart change
• The car color/wheels matching your actual car is a fun improvement that feels more special/customized
• The top pull-down menu on the pilot panel is a good way to stash extra less-used features. It's easy to argue that some aren't "less-used" by some people -- which includes me, the serial Trip Info button presser -- but I think this design makes sense overall.
• Parking cameras seem to be less sensitive to auto-trigger when in stop and go traffic, and also turn off at 5mph rather than 17mph when they auto-trigger
• Blind spot / blinker cameras look clearer to me, especially at dusk where it's not fully dark

Cons:

This list is long not because it's more bad than good but because I wanted to explain WHY in a logical, design focused way.

Starting with the upper screen...

The Home screen and its new card design provides no useful functionality and actually removes at-a-glance Nav info and quick-launch Media functionality present in UX2. I don't see any reason why the home screen was changed at all, other than to create a dedicated AA/CP button at the top, which is helpful. In my opinion, the aesthetic design of the UX2 home screen was far more pleasing, upscale, and unique looking than the new UX3 card layout. It also didn't fight with the curved screen shape in the Air. Addressing each of the home screen cards individually:

• Nav Card
  • The original home screen showed Home and Work with estimated travel times and the suggested road you should take. This was at-a-glance without selecting anything. UX3 Nav card has no glanceable information, only allowing you to tap Home/Work which you could already do in UX2. Tapping the Nav card just pulls up the Nav screen, which is redundant with the permanent Nav icon on the left of the home screen. While driving, the Nav card shows movement that is distracting, but not large or detailed enough to provide any useful information. In summary, a downgrade from UX2.
• Media Card
  • The media card on the home screen offers play/pause and skip fwd/back buttons, which could be useful if there was any other reason to actually use the home screen. Since the Nav and Phone (see next bullet) home cards are useless, you might as well just stay on the Media screen to control media (or use the steering wheel buttons). In UX2, the home screen had icons allowing you to launch any of the last 6 stations/albums you listened to so this functionality was lost from the UX3 home screen as well.
• Phone Card
  • This card provides no information and does nothing except launch AA/CP, which is redundant with the dedicated permanent button in the top bar. The top right corner is also cutoff, showing that this new UX design doesn't even take into account Lucid's unique dash screen design language. This just exacerbates the negatives of that screen shape and in my opinion, results in a more generic looking UX that could've been designed for any phone or tablet.
• The dedicated Media screen on the upper panel is poorly laid out with lots of small buttons that could be stashed instead, like in UX2. I don't see any functional improvement over UX2, but it looks (again, in my opinion) uglier and clunkier. It does at least have the quick-launch of the last 5 stations/albums that was lost from Home screen.
• As many have noted, the new lighter color schemes from Vibes reduce contrast on the entire upper screen and while not terrible, it's another downgrade from UX2 in terms of contrast/visibility and in my opinion looks worse.
• AA and CP are harder to navigate/see in my opinion now that they stretch to the left edge of the screen.

For the lower screen, the Pilot Panel:

• The main car screen graphics are very pretty but belong on a website, not on a screen while you are driving. At a minimum, these images should have been done in a nighttime setting to darken and tone them down (more like the UX2 image).
• The Tidal app continues to be pretty bad and the "now playing" media bar is too small and at the bottom of the screen, making it harder and frankly less safe to interact with while driving

Very thorough review, these things never occurred to me, and probably won’t bother me much.

 

[socktucker]

I actually have a UX/UI degree and agree with most of it. There are some odd choices too, especially the absurd gradients/bloom on the upper screen, particularly when the map is displayed. It blurs out what little visible information there is and is inconsistent. It’s also so cluttered with crap that it’s basically useless. The bottom nav is also poorly laid out when not in use. The Vibes thing should just be abandoned, make themes that look markedly different, not just different shades of brown or green. Who is that for?

I have to remind myself this is ported from the Gravity which has different screens where some designed choices make more sense. As you pointed out, the way UX2 used the curved top screen was much better.

I disagree on cards, though. I think it’s a more dynamic display that people expect. The phone one looks weird how it’s cut off by the screen. The screen size is definitely form over function, but made totally operable by UX2. With UX3, the curved screen looks like a mistake.

I think the overall issue is that a curved screen really only works when the software is designed for the curved screen. UX3 clearly was not, so it looks weird.

I think they made the middle power/charge meter way less bouncy too, which is welcome. Or that could just be a placebo effect where annoyances “disappear” because I expected them too.

UX3, despite some mostly subjective styling or odd choices, is a much more modern design language. In a non-software equivalent though…the top screen UX is now more like…idk like an Art Deco decor on a Spanish Revival design home. They both look great, but not together. But also don’t look totally terrible.

 

[GratefulMed]

Not that anyone cares but sharing this info as I see it. I have done UX design before, albeit many years ago and for financial software. This post is long so I started with a TLDR and I tried to base my feedback on factual information. Where something is opinion/personal preference, I tried to indicate that. I'm aware this is all in reference to the UX of a luxury car, so none of this should be taken too seriously. First world problems, as they say...

TLDR: Overall performance (snappiness) is excellent and should be applauded. Love the sound improvements. Separating the pilot panel from the upper screen is a useful and very welcome enhancement. The design/UX of the upper screen should've stayed unchanged from UX2 (with minor tweaks like the dedicated AA/CP button) while the UX3 design of the lower pilot panel is generally a welcome improvement.

Pros:

• Overall performance is excellent. No stutters or hiccups when interacting with the interface. Optimizing performance is hard to get right and Lucid deserves a lot of credit for this.
• Sound quality is greatly improved (I have SSP). I don't know what they did but it's like they implemented automatic variable loudness based on volume level, and/or changed to a logarithmic volume scale.
• Music starts up automatically and where it left off, instead of never, or 10 songs back! Yay!
• Allowing the pilot panel and upper screen to operate independently gives welcome flexibility
• Pilot panel menu customizability is a great addition, allowing each owner to select most used screens in the permanent menu options
• Combining seat adjustments and massage functionality into one screen makes sense and is a smart change
• The car color/wheels matching your actual car is a fun improvement that feels more special/customized
• The top pull-down menu on the pilot panel is a good way to stash extra less-used features. It's easy to argue that some aren't "less-used" by some people -- which includes me, the serial Trip Info button presser -- but I think this design makes sense overall.
• Parking cameras seem to be less sensitive to auto-trigger when in stop and go traffic, and also turn off at 5mph rather than 17mph when they auto-trigger
• Blind spot / blinker cameras look clearer to me, especially at dusk where it's not fully dark

Cons:

This list is long not because it's more bad than good but because I wanted to explain WHY in a logical, design focused way.

Starting with the upper screen...

The Home screen and its new card design provides no useful functionality and actually removes at-a-glance Nav info and quick-launch Media functionality present in UX2. I don't see any reason why the home screen was changed at all, other than to create a dedicated AA/CP button at the top, which is helpful. In my opinion, the aesthetic design of the UX2 home screen was far more pleasing, upscale, and unique looking than the new UX3 card layout. It also didn't fight with the curved screen shape in the Air. Addressing each of the home screen cards individually:

• Nav Card
  • The original home screen showed Home and Work with estimated travel times and the suggested road you should take. This was at-a-glance without selecting anything. UX3 Nav card has no glanceable information, only allowing you to tap Home/Work which you could already do in UX2. Tapping the Nav card just pulls up the Nav screen, which is redundant with the permanent Nav icon on the left of the home screen. While driving, the Nav card shows movement that is distracting, but not large or detailed enough to provide any useful information. In summary, a downgrade from UX2.
• Media Card
  • The media card on the home screen offers play/pause and skip fwd/back buttons, which could be useful if there was any other reason to actually use the home screen. Since the Nav and Phone (see next bullet) home cards are useless, you might as well just stay on the Media screen to control media (or use the steering wheel buttons). In UX2, the home screen had icons allowing you to launch any of the last 6 stations/albums you listened to so this functionality was lost from the UX3 home screen as well.
• Phone Card
  • This card provides no information and does nothing except launch AA/CP, which is redundant with the dedicated permanent button in the top bar. The top right corner is also cutoff, showing that this new UX design doesn't even take into account Lucid's unique dash screen design language. This just exacerbates the negatives of that screen shape and in my opinion, results in a more generic looking UX that could've been designed for any phone or tablet.
• The dedicated Media screen on the upper panel is poorly laid out with lots of small buttons that could be stashed instead, like in UX2. I don't see any functional improvement over UX2, but it looks (again, in my opinion) uglier and clunkier. It does at least have the quick-launch of the last 5 stations/albums that was lost from Home screen.
• As many have noted, the new lighter color schemes from Vibes reduce contrast on the entire upper screen and while not terrible, it's another downgrade from UX2 in terms of contrast/visibility and in my opinion looks worse.
• AA and CP are harder to navigate/see in my opinion now that they stretch to the left edge of the screen.

For the lower screen, the Pilot Panel:

• The main car screen graphics are very pretty but belong on a website, not on a screen while you are driving. At a minimum, these images should have been done in a nighttime setting to darken and tone them down (more like the UX2 image).
• The Tidal app continues to be pretty bad and the "now playing" media bar is too small and at the bottom of the screen, making it harder and frankly less safe to interact with while driving

I agree with everything you say here. Plus the move from a jet black background to this hazy gray is a serious downgrade. The previous UX had a luxurious minimalism. Now things look much more like other cars - for the worse. Favorite addition for me is the AA/CarPlay button up top.

 

[Aka-none]

I agree with everything you say here. Plus the move from a jet black background to this hazy gray is a serious downgrade. The previous UX had a luxurious minimalism. Now things look much more like other cars - for the worse. Favorite addition for me is the AA/CarPlay button up top.

Yeah that grayness is mmm unwelcome.

On the flip side I stopped at the Tesla dealer yesterday and had them show me a maxed out MY. Sigh still looks like a child’s toy. Seats are horrid and uncomfortable and the design makes my body hurt just looking at it.

 

[imperium2000]

I generally really like UX3.
-I agree with most of what you've said except I do think the 3 card home screen is an improvement but not as well implemented. My prior BMW iX had a similar card based home screen but the cards were bigger so the map was more useful and you could customize the cards to what you wanted.

-I like the graphic of the car that now mirrors your actual car's color and wheels. But I agree that they need a night mode. At night, the screen is too bright.

-I hate hate hate that bloom effect. It is fine in daylight but at night, it is blindingly bright and makes everything washed out. This whole "Vibe"/"Theme" thing is just lame. They should just allow us to choose pipping light color and screen color and leave it at that.

 

[Aka-none]

I wonder if an iPad screen protector could cut down the intensity

 

[Solomente]

I generally really like UX3.
-I agree with most of what you've said except I do think the 3 card home screen is an improvement but not as well implemented. My prior BMW iX had a similar card based home screen but the cards were bigger so the map was more useful and you could customize the cards to what you wanted.

-I like the graphic of the car that now mirrors your actual car's color and wheels. But I agree that they need a night mode. At night, the screen is too bright.

-I hate hate hate that bloom effect. It is fine in daylight but at night, it is blindingly bright and makes everything washed out. This whole "Vibe"/"Theme" thing is just lame. They should just allow us to choose pipping light color and screen color and leave it at that.

My suspicion is that there will be additional cards in the future as new features and/or apps are made available. And when that happens, customization over which are displayed and where. That's probably why this UX will make more sense in the long run even if it's awkward right now.

I agree with your other points.

 

[socktucker]

-I hate hate hate that bloom effect. It is fine in daylight but at night, it

its oddly placed too. I think its supposed to bloom from the middle point of the screen, but it comes out looking weird because its really two screens.

 

[Solomente]

One other thing I noticed after posting is with the upper Nav screen, which I don't use much. The menu bar at the top left of the map is way too big and intrusive and just sits there blocking the view. Tapping the search bar forces you to type your search into the lower screen anyway, so why have a bar at all? Use a magnifying glass icon, cut the space between all the buttons, align them into a single row (maybe vertically) and you save half the space without cutting any functionality.

 

[knewman]

Excellent write-up, your pros/cons mostly mirror that of my own. I'm not a fan of the revised glass cockpit homescreen and I typically leave it on media. It feels like some of the design elements were ported over from Gravity without much thought towards optimizing for differences in Air's hardware. Maybe we'll see improvements on that front in the future. But overall I'm still super pleased with 2.11.

It's great to discuss here but make sure to bring these points to Lucid's attention as well, either via a support request or their feedback mailbox.

 

[Aka-none]

its oddly placed too. I think its supposed to bloom from the middle point of the screen, but it comes out looking weird because its really two screens.

You know I was just thinking about this and it reminds me of putting a desktop on a multi monitor setup and how parts of the image end up as just a light or dark place on the screens.
So I wonder if it is an artifact of the background image?
Thoughts?

 

[socktucker]

You know I was just thinking about this and it reminds me of putting a desktop on a multi monitor setup and how parts of the image end up as just a light or dark place on the screens.
So I wonder if it is an artifact of the background image?
Thoughts?

The gradient is definitely centered in the bottom right of the left display panel. It makes more sense on the home screen with the cards. When you open the nav though, what happens is the gradient has the same origin point-but then there’s another element (then vertical menu) that also casts its own gradient but it casts it at a 90 degree angle and just comes out bizzare. I’ve attached a high quality example of the gradient source angles. There’s at least three.

 

[Chris R]

I completely agree with all the comments on the lack of legibility on the new HMI; white on various shades of light gray is not good. It is also bad on the maps, normal mode is light gray roads on a light green background, if you switch to dark mode, you get dark gray roads on a black background. The UX2 jet-black background on the cockpit panel background was far more legible and looked better (the current gradient background looks like a bad edge-lit TN monitor).

 

[Aka-none]

The gradient is definitely centered in the bottom right of the left display panel. It makes more sense on the home screen with the cards. When you open the nav though, what happens is the gradient has the same origin point-but then there’s another element (then vertical menu) that also casts its own gradient but it casts it at a 90 degree angle and just comes out bizzare. I’ve attached a high quality example of the gradient source angles. There’s at least three. View attachment 41648

Oh dear, anyone know how these screens are backlit?

 

[socktucker]

Oh dear, anyone know how these screens are backlit?

That’s not backlighting it’s just a gradient overlay, they could make it from any angle.

I think I figured out why it looks so “busy”. There’s gradient, bloom, drop shadow and bevels all on one screen due to the different elements. Some they can change, some they can’t.

When you have pilot panel open, it has a gradiant lighting effect that is lower and to the left. So imagine the light source for all gradients on both panels is roughly where 3 o’clock is on the steering wheel and glows 360 degrees. I get what they were doing now.

 

[borski]

I wonder if an iPad screen protector could cut down the intensity

From @TWRAPS https://twraps.com/products/screen-protectors-for-lucid-air-9h-hardness-pet