DailyUI 034 – Car Interface

Let me preface this with the fact that I know very little about cars. The information I have here is taken from what I’ve seen across different images and my observations while riding in cars. This is what I figured was most important.

This is a very simplistic design. Almost a bit too much so. In hindsight I feel it might be quite hard to read while driving, it maybe should have been a bit more emphasised. But let’s take this from top left to bottom.

In the corner there’s a Bluetooth button and a battery indicator. I figured this would show if you’ve connected your phone to the car. In the middle is the date and time. I feel like in the empty space to the right I could have added a playback button for easy access to your music.

Then we have the speedometer. This one was tricky for me, because I had no idea what these actually look like, even though I’ve seen them a thousand times. The spacing was completely off for everything, and by the time I noticed it, too much time had passed for me to bother changing it. This is how it goes when you set time limits, very reminiscent of actual deadlines.

Right next to this is the fuel meter, a simple 4 dash indicator that tells you how much fuel is left. On the far right is the internal temperature meter. First showing the degrees inside the car with arrows to each side for easy changing. Below this we have two things. One is the strength of the AC fans, with arrows to increase or decrease. The second is the AC fan direction settings.

At the bottom is the navigation bar so you can switch between different sections. The icons here are big and I tried to make them as obvious as possible, but the text is there just in case they don’t make enough sense. Here I noticed that I as usual didn’t position the music icon properly and it’s slightly more elevated than the rest. I also didn’t really know how to really show which segment you’re in. For some reason I was really keen on having all the icons the yellow colour, so I added the dash beneath the icon. Works alright.

I picked this colour scheme mostly because I wanted to try something new. The green was very pleasant I thought and it looked good in contrast to the dark background. But I wanted something punchy to stand out from the subdued green, so I chose the yellow. I think this is quite a nice combination.

Icons are as usual made from scratch, except the Bluetooth icon. I figured because it’s a standardised icon I shouldn’t even bother trying to make it myself. The biggest here were the navigation buttons. The dashboard icon was supposed to represent the speedometer and the two segments simplified into lines. The music icon is a standard musical note, but I made it too wide and bigger than the rest of the icons I think. Navigation icon is a standard navigation arrow and the settings icon has a wrench. I did the wrench instead of a cogwheel for the sake of saving time.

In the end, while I really dig the colours and some of the simplicity, I feel like there’s no real balance here. I didn’t really work with spacing things out in a proper manner, leaving the speedometer look small in comparison to the rest, and the temperature section being so much longer than the rest. The yellow text on the green in the navigation bar is also quite hard to read, and I figure it’s because of my choice of using a light font, even though I rarely do that.

This one was a challenge. Not really sure if I nailed it or not, though.