To start the development of this project, I sketched out the floor plan for the interior of the car. This was really useful due to the custom design of the interior I wanted and helped me to keep track of the space I was designing in. It also helped me to work out what size of screen was possible to fit into a car, which I worked out came to around a 1600cmx900cm display. This was great to know as it let me design the interface on a 16x9 screen size which is a very common screen size.
Next, I created a rough site map of what needed to be included in the dashboard. While this would change throughout the project, it was really useful to do this early on as it let me establish a general structure and page layout for the site map, as well as think about what needed to be included on each screen.
Having decided on 5 main screens in the site map, I began to sketch out what these could look like. I kept these quick initially to explore layout options, which allowed me to get a lot of ideas down on paper. After sketching out each screen, I assessed which would work best for each screen, and which would work best together. Because these 5 screens will be on the same hierarchical level, I found it useful to not only consider each screen’s layout but also how each screen’s layout fits with the other screens, so as to keep a structural cohesion between screens.
With a structure for each screen decided, I re-sketched them in more detail which would help when I started working digitally. I went with a modular tiled structure for the screens, as this would help to keep the information and content organised due to how much there was of it. The modular tiled structure would also work well as it would help visual and structural cohesion between screens.
After completing the wireframe sketches, I listed the icons I thought I would need for the dashboard and sketched them out. Some were standard icons like play, Bluetooth, and wifi, while some were more challenging to sketch as they were unique to my dashboard or represented ideas or actions.