When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
For the last 6 months at Dashbox HQ, we have been researching, designing and testing a brand new car app concept for iPhone (soon to be iPad and Android) which basically reduces the cognitive load whilst driving and gives access to integrated navigation (either using our own navi or Waze, Google Maps or Apple Maps). On top of this we have integrated a neat music player that pulls in either Spotify or iTunes music, integrated voice commands like "Call Thomas" and other useful features like a global device search functionality, adding app shortcuts from your device, find my car functionality, integrated navigation including 3rd party such as Waze, commute time notifications, video recorder (for insurance purposes) and much more.
Add all your shortcuts to the dashboard
One of the main focuses is using one tap to start navigation, one tap to start music and one tap to call. Navigation directions and music are merged into one interface so there's no context switching. You're always looking at the next direction and changing songs is a simple swipe. During our research and testing phase we calculated doing these main functions in 6 seconds compared to 40+ seconds using individual iOS app switching and even longer using Siri (if you ever get it to understand complex accents and phrases). By reducing time to perform your most used in car functions we reduced the cognitive load to improve driving safety. This was key to our end goal whilst also aiming to deliver an awesome design and user experience, something most archaic car systems fail to deliver.
Android user input:
Probably not. Smartphones these days are "paged," i.e. swipe left or right to get to different custom pages you set up. My phone already has a page set up for quick access to all that. I wouldn't need an app running to put more load on my phone battery when I can just set up a page with functionality the phone already has. For changing music even while nav is running, the phone is connected via Bluetooth so I just use the controls on the head unit and don't have to leave the map screen.
Would you consider a Phone app?
