Product design question
Design a new car dashboard.
- Meta
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design for a safety-critical interface, requiring prioritization of glanceable, low-distraction information.
How to approach it
- Segment users: daily commuters wanting quick, familiar information, and drivers using in-car apps that add potential distraction.
- Identify the pain point: modern dashboards increasingly pack in touchscreens and information that pull driver attention away from the road.
- Prioritize minimizing distraction while preserving essential information, since safety must outweigh feature richness.
- Design the solution: a glanceable heads-up layer for critical info like speed and alerts, with deeper info relegated to a secondary screen or voice interface.
- Add a personalization layer: driver-specific profiles adjusting layout and default views based on known preferences.
- Define success: reduction in average glance-away time from the road and driver-reported ease of finding key information.
What a strong answer includes
- Frames the design problem correctly around driver distraction and safety, the central constraint for any car dashboard.
- Separates time-critical information from secondary information, a meaningful information-architecture decision.
- Proposes glance-away time as a genuinely safety-relevant success metric, not just user satisfaction.
- Considers personalization without adding cognitive load, a thoughtful balance for a safety-critical product.
Common mistakes
- Designing a feature-rich, touchscreen-heavy dashboard without addressing driver distraction risk.
- Not prioritizing which information is truly time-critical versus secondary.
- Ignoring measurable safety outcomes in favor of aesthetic or feature-based success metrics.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you test this dashboard's safety impact before shipping it in real vehicles?
- How would you handle passengers wanting to interact with the same screen while driving?
- What regulatory safety standards would constrain this design?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop