Feature Addition - Apple CarPlay

The Apple CarPlay is an application which is integrated to built in car displays. The CarPlay enables iPhone users to operate their iPhone while driving to get directions, make calls, enjoy music and much more. Being an aspiring UIUX practitioner I’ve always had a skeptic approach towards all screens and interfaces I use or come across. During the 2021 summer break, I got an opportunity to hit the road and explore California. Being an iPhone and car play user during the summer I spent quite a lot of time on these two devices from which I came up with an idea of a feature addition and a UX enhancement for the Apple CarPlay.

The problem

The most common discussion which happens at least once during a group of friends traveling on a road trip is about choosing the right playlist which suits everyone's music taste. It might take a long time to understand the common taste of music from a group of a people. My personal experience in this case is reaching an agreement almost at the end of the trip which is kind of a disappointment. With this observation, I came up with an idea to overcome this issue. What if the Apple CarPlay was able to identify common songs on the playlist of each person in the car and create a curated playlist which would be inclusive of common songs?

In addition to this feature addition idea, another drawback which I identified was that Apple CarPlay doesn't allow multitasking interface for music while operating maps. This was not the case with Android Play which is a competitor for the Apple CarPlay.

User Research

Before I could come up with a user experience aligned solution for this problem, it was paramount to validate my hypothesis and avoid unwanted assumptions. For user research, I decided to interview a few users of iPhone and CarPlay to know about their experiences. I interviewed a total of 5 participants. It was a semi-structured interview with an interview protocol consisting of mainly open ended questions to allow users to talk. To identify the user pain points the questions were structured to guide participants around my hypothesis without directly asking about the drawbacks of their experiences with the Apple CarPlay. 

Interview Overview

User Journey

Ideation

Currently, Apple Music allows users to follow friends, see what they are listening to. I wanted to take this experience of being musically connected with friends from phones to cars. The pain points being identified earlier in this study, Group Play(MIX) was the answer to all of them. This would enable users to come up with a unified playlist for road trips only in a few steps. In accordance with the rich set of design resources provided by Apple in their human interface guidelines, I came up with a feature addition for apple music as well as a redesign of the multitasking in-map music control.

Sketches and Low Fidelity Wireframes

High Fidelity Wireframes