Reimagining Buick’s Cockpit

One Screen, One Experience

Case Study

Overview

When I joined General Motors in 2018 as a UX Design Lead for In-Vehicle Infotainment, Buick was at an inflection point. The brand stood for quiet sophistication and modern luxury, yet its in-vehicle experience still reflected an earlier era — a mix of digital screens surrounded by hard buttons and knobs for climate, navigation, and media.

The system worked, but it felt fragmented. Each control existed in isolation, requiring multiple inputs and distracting the driver from the road. The opportunity was clear: elevate Buick’s digital experience to match its design philosophy — serene, intuitive, and connected.

From Hard Buttons to a Harmonized, Digital, Modern, Human-Centered Cockpit

2018 Buick Encore

2024 Buick Encore

My Role

Design Leadership - Buick Framework, Climate Controls & Home

Experience Ownership
Directed the full UX lifecycle for GM’s Themes application, delivering customizable in-vehicle interfaces across Chevy, GMC, Buick, and Cadillac platforms.

Research-Driven Strategy
Conducted competitive benchmarking (BMW, Mercedes, Tesla, Lucid, Audi etc.), synthesized user insights, and identified key journey/feature gaps to guide roadmap priorities and future experience vision.

Cross-Functional Delivery & Launch Readiness
Partnered with product, engineering, and research teams to build accessible, compliant UI solutions, ensuring smooth handoff to development, QA alignment, and on-time production releases.

Design System Modernization
Led a multi-brand DesignOps initiative to audit, standardize, and streamline a design system spanning 35+ infotainment apps—reducing inconsistencies and minimizing engineering/design drift.

Understanding Hardware & Engineering Constraints

Transforming an infotainment system wasn’t just a design challenge — it was a technical balancing act.
We were designing for a platform shared across multiple vehicle lines, each with different screen resolutions, processing power, and legacy hardware dependencies.

Some of the challenges included:

Limited GPU and RAM capacity constrained motion fidelity and transition timing.
Varying aspect ratios required adaptive layouts that scaled from compact SUVs to premium sedans.
Backend limitations in legacy architecture made real-time personalization difficult.

To address these, I worked closely with HMI engineers, embedded software teams, and system architects to define what could be achieved within each hardware tier. We prioritized performance-critical interactions (navigation, voice, climate) for native execution, while secondary layers used lightweight frameworks.

This collaboration turned constraints into design principles — focusing on efficiency, clarity, and resilience, ensuring the experience remained smooth even under system load or hardware variance.

Building the Vision

I started working on low-fidelity prototypes with cross-functional teams in Detroit and Warren, I helped define a North Star vision.

Prototyping & Validation

I translated this vision into high-fidelity prototypes, simulating real-time behaviors — touch response, haptic cues, animation timing, and adaptive layouts.

Testing spanned multiple contexts:

Driving simulators to measure driver distraction and glance time.
On-road prototypes to assess visibility, latency, and adaptive feedback.
Accessibility and comfort studies across demographics and driving conditions.
User Research by Interviewing GM drivers and ran surveys and usability tests to uncover pain points around theme discovery, customization, and performance.
Competitive Benchmarking by reviewing automotive and consumer personalization apps to identify best practices, gaps, and opportunities for differentiation.
Usability Testing & Iteration by testing interactive prototypes with real users to validate navigation, previews, and customization flows, refining the design through rapid iteration.

Our validation showed that a well-designed digital interface could replace physical redundancy while enhancing confidence and delight.

Buick Video of infotainment

Following prototyping and validation, we refined the visual design to align with Buick’s brand expression and premium aesthetic.

Bringing Buick’s Brand to Life

Delivering the Outcome

The result was a fully digital infotainment experience framework that felt sophisticated yet effortless — a reflection of Buick’s “QuietTuning” ethos.

The redesigned system unified:

Cockpit & Infotainment: Unified one ecosystem.
Digital Controls: It is easier to update and modernize software than hard controls, and it is cost effective.
Music & Media: Simplified browsing, personalized playlists, and one-touch favorites.
Navigation: Native Google Maps integration with real-time traffic and voice-first control.
Climate: Clean visual layouts and adaptive haptics replaced redundant hard controls.
Settings & Profiles: Driver personalization synced seamlessly with cloud-based accounts.
Google Integration: Just login and connect to your calendar, alerts nad emails.

Measured Impact:

40% reduction in visual clutter and menu layers
25% faster average task completion
Significant uplift in driver satisfaction and UX benchmark scores
Recognition: The project earned 3rd place in GM’s Global Culture Award, celebrating cross-functional collaboration, innovation, and impact on user experience across General Motors.

Reflection

This project was more than a redesign — it was a shift in mindset. Buick moved from a hardware-driven interface to a software-defined, human-centered experience, one that connects the driver not just to their vehicle, but to their everyday rhythm.

By grounding design in empathy, clarity, and collaboration — while balancing real-world constraints — we transformed a semi-digital cockpit into a calm, intelligent, and connected experience that embodied Buick’s vision of modern luxury through simplicity and grace.