I always thought that LCARS was a very cool display system, but after studying UI and UX design, I’ve come to find that it’s actually a pretty bad HUD for at-a-glance information display. It’s ok for displaying certain types of information and arrangements of certain controls, but it was designed by the Okudas in the late 80s. We’ve come a long way since then.

What it is very good for, however, is looking really cool on screen. They’ve updated it over the years to include spiffy, animations and such. It still looks pretty futuristic, even though it’s almost 40 years old.