Hyundai Connectivity Application - Bluelink | 2020

Designers: Infotainment UX Development Team, Hyundai Motor Group, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Manufacturer: Hyundai Motor Group, Gangnam-gu, Soeul, Republic of Korea

OVERVIEW

Bluelink app, Hyundai Motor’s Mobile Connected Service, allows you to experience on your mobile device functions previously available while only in the car. Instead of simply recreating in-car functions, it focuses on user’s lifecycle, like starting your car in advance, pre-setting the climate control depending on the weather, or sending the destination address to the car’s navigation system. You can find your parked car with LBS function. It offers comprehensive door-to-door directions with AR and pedestrian route guidance to include even walking directions from your car to the doorstep. The App is synced with external services like weather, calendar and music streaming for you to control every function for your mobility life from your Bluelink app. You can also customize your own remote with favorite functions. If you back up your profile, your existing settings transfer over to your new car, making your experience feel new and familiar at once.

INNOVATION

In addition to innovating design aesthetics or user experience-based interface, tremendous effort has been put into the Bluelink app to analyze the user’s flow of usage, patterns and processes in order to create a simpler and easier yet more comprehensive user environment. Your customized settings and usage data from your own car can be transferred to your new car or even a shared car, allowing you to use the same settings in any vehicle from Hyundai Motors, Genesis or Kia Motors. Even when you’re using car sharing or renting, you can continue to enjoy a consistent driving experience by syncing your account or restoring backup data. Another advantage of using Bluelink app is that a single Bluelink account can easily access Hyundai Motor’s other family apps, from digital key and commercial vehicle (bus or truck) to car pay. The App is designed with a consistent look and feel of these other apps in order for the user to gain familiarity. This will serve as an important foundation for consolidating all family apps into one channel, as Bluelink’s ultimate goal is to create an Integrated Connected Service based on the same policies and usability.

BRANDING

Through Bluelink, Hyundai Motors plans to focus on various connected services (Calendar, Car-to-Home Control, Entertainment, Media, etc.), customized settings, concierge function and other areas beyond the conventional need for a means of transportation, catering to the needs of the driver as well as his family during the journey. Hyundai Motors also hopes to increase customers’ brand loyalty through familiar, contextual functions and intuitive interface and to offer a differentiated mobility experience as the leading frontier of the autonomous driving era. By applying a consistent design language and consistent interface, Hyundai Motors is developing a familiar yet intuitive design structure that is unique to Bluelink app in order for the user to utilize the continuously expanding functions and contents without learning how to use them. Also, by analyzing user preferences and usage patterns, layouts and customized settings change dynamically by occasion, giving customers another key reason to choose Hyundai Motors. Likewise, this user-centered experience design, defined around the Bluelink app service, is being applied to the mobile services offered by all of Hyundai Motors brands like Genesis, Kia Motors, N and IONIQ. We are building our design identity in a way that every customer who uses our vehicle can feel each brand’s unique color and enjoy the familiar usability at the same time.

GOAL

Hyundai Motor’s brand identity and design principle have been applied to Bluelink app’s layout, color, font, icon, infographic and other design elements, so the brand experience continues with consistent look and feel. Its digital contents that can be rearranged according to the user’s needs are provided with a user-friendly analog metaphor as a means of achieving a familiar yet dynamic Digilog(Digital+Analog) user experience.

The card-type structure offers the most reliable expandability to host the ever-increasing functions, and it can also respond dynamically whenever the user requests different visuals. It’s also flexible enough to rearrange the cards’ order when needed, and it serves as a dashboard that displays an overview of certain contents or status of a function, as well as an entry channel for status checks and immediate access to the control menu.

The affordance element of icons and buttons used in the actual vehicle has been reflected in the design in order to transfer the same control experience in the car to mobile. The customizable control button card in particular guarantees the same level of usability and intuitiveness as that of using a remote control.

You can intuitively monitor the open/close status of your bonnet, door, trunk and windows through the graphic image of your car on the screen as if you are actually looking at it.

Bluelink app will continue to strengthen its brand experience by adding more convenient functions and contents as well as more intuitive and consistent usability.