Cyberpunk is a popular UI design style, often chosen for futuristic games, websites, and art projects. As an aesthetic, cyberpunk often refers to the darker side of technological advancement. It’s future-looking, often playing with what we might see in an even more technologically advanced society. In terms of future user interface (UI) design, we might see a society with even more access to data and data-based insights, predictions, and controls. This leads us into the realm of cyberpunk UI dashboards.
Related: What is Cyberpunk Aesthetic?
In a future society where companies, states, and institutions have even more access to our personal data, what might futuristic UI dashboards look like?
How to design a Cyberpunk UI Dashboard
If you want to design a cyberpunk-styled UI dashboard, I recommend using a dark background and bright neon colors to highlight text and data content. The data content can be numbers, percentages, loading bars, progress bars, and so on.
You can take inspiration from UI elements in futuristic game design, such as cut-off corners on buttons, glitch effects, glass effect on cards, and graphics that simulate the zoom lens on a camera. Another popular cyberpunk metaphor is to refer to hacking or coding.
Cyberpunk UI Dashboard Inspiration
One great example is the Cyberpunk Admin Dashboard Template I found on aura.build (see screenshot below).
As you can see, the design uses a dark mode style, with bright neon colors for highlighting text and data. It also plays on the “hacker” style, using codes and keyboard shortcuts as button text.
If we take inspiration from cyberpunk movies, we can also find floating UIs, projected into mid-air, that users interact with using hand motions. The hand motions can be detected by motion sensors, cameras, or hand-held devices, similar to those we use for VR today. However, I have yet to see these types of sci-fi inventions implemented in dashboard websites. In addition, I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing concept art of dashboards that would allow users to interact with them using voice.
How Would an AI Cyberpunk UI Dashboard Look Like?
As AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude are becoming increasingly popular, some argue that we won’t see any traditional user interfaces in the future. Everything will be chatbot-based, and we won’t need to click, observe, or analyse anything. AI will do it for us. We could ask AI what we want in a chat-based conversation, and the AI system will find, analyze, and observe the data for us. In a scenario like this, we probably won’t need to design any dashboards anymore.
However, if we still want to maintain human control and oversight of the data, we might still want to keep our UI dashboards, even if we add an AI chatbot into the mix. I can imagine that an AI-based cyberpunk UI dashboard would combine an AI chatbot interface on one side, while still affording the user to click around and explore the data manually. Similar to how Cursor’s UI is set up today.
What do you think?
Read more: What is Human-AI Interaction?