I want to preface this case study by stating that I have the utmost respect for the designers and engineers at Tesla, and this redesign is born out of a desire to further my own education as a designer.

There are only a few tech companies in the world, at least in my mind, that really, really, truly care about design and innovation. Companies that dare to ask the crazy questions. To push the envelope further. And in recent years, nobody is better at this to me than Tesla.

And when it comes to disrupting an industry, few can boast quite like Tesla. They have disrupted a market that has been happily uninterrupted for the good part of a century. And they have achieved this because of their almost zealous commitment to asking questions, and answering them just as fearlessly.

The questions can be small such as “Why can’t a car key be a card?” Or grander such as “Why have a dashboard and tactile controls, when you’ve got a 15-inch behemoth of a display in front of you?” And of course, the question that started it all: “Why can’t cars be electric?”

However, my purpose in this article is not to discuss why Tesla is such a great company, because you already know that. Rather, my goal here is to examine one aspect that I feel has always been lacking that certain sense of polish — Tesla’s mobile application. For a company that has worked on interfaces as inspired as the one in the Model 3, I feel that their mobile app, by contrast, is far removed from the company’s ideals and philosophy.

On top of this, the Model 3 key fob is a whopping $150 extra, making the mobile application the primary way for an owner to interact with their car.

Tesla and its customers not only need, but deserve a better experience.

And so about two months ago, I embarked on probably my most extensive personal project yet. What you’ll find below is a case study detailing my thought process, and the potential solutions to the issues I see with Tesla’s mobile app.

The Problem

Before outlining my solution, I want to first dive deeper into why I think the Tesla app deserves a redesign in the first place. I mentioned briefly that I feel it does not adhere to the standard of which I hold Tesla to. You see, when you sit in a Tesla, you have the sudden feeling that you have without a doubt just stepped into the future. It’s as though Elon himself had loaned the car from the year 2050 using the same time machine he probably uses to run all of his companies.