With our research in mind we created a persona to keep in mind while ideating and designing.

This is Tina, a divorcee working as an astrophysicist in Los Angeles. With her son going to college, she has more time to spend on herself , with her dog, and with her friends.

From our research, a major potential point of friction is moving into and out of your car. You can connect to Bluetooth, but you’ll be limited to music and phone calls. With Apple’s well-defined ecosystem, there’s an opportunity to improve this interaction tremendously.

One of the major things that people are averse to is seeing “Settings” pages when talking about a new feature or concept. A lot of this concept would happen there, potentially, so I made a quick proof of concept just to show what a user might actually encounter during the actual event.

As a team, we realized we would need a “home” for our concepts to work from, so to speak. As a team we all agreed on a long, narrow screen for the meter and an iPad-sized screen for the center console, with the feature of MagSafe connections to use whatever sized screens the owner would prefer. We all worked on some rough concepts for the “Home” of this center screen. These are the roughs I came up with.

To actually make a “seamless” transition between devices, we realized that, in the years to come, not only would it become easier for our devices to recognize what apps or processes need to be moved but also that some of the process could be handled with selected settings. Although there’s the appearance of less user agency in the new concept it’s actually been moved to a Settings menu.

It took some time for the design system to really come together. We started with colors, since Apple has a really well defined color system. In the context of vehicles, however, colors have really important meanings. We set up our color system to set aside alert colors (red, orange, and yellow) as well as the normal vs. autonomous colors (blue and purple) so we could start figuring out the rest of our available options and uses.

To reflect the combined heritage of Apple’s iOS and Apple Vision design systems, there’s a strong use of cards to define layouts, iconography, and rounded visual language for clickable items.

With a revised concept of how the transition should actually occur, it quickly became apparent that the active process should take precedence over other tasks, i.e. a FaceTime call should become, hierarchically, the most important active app on the screen. With that in mind, we needed a way to move other apps out of the way.

Since the phone can be placed on the MagSafe dock and used as an additional screen, we can move the clock off of the main screen’s Tab Bar. This gives us plentiful space to move apps to the Tab Bar to form the equivalent of the Dock, which is in familiar use on many other Apple devices. This change means that the active process can now utilize the entirety of the screen.

Like many of Apple’s features (such as Apple ID and Continuity) the magic is happening behind the scenes, and adjustments have to be made in Settings and Profiles. Showing a Settings page is a boring way to promote a new concept, especially because it’s not the part that will be most interacted with. This prototype shows how the actual user experience will play out.