Three findings came out of the research, and they turned into five recommendations in priority order. Everything below this section is the evidence behind them.
Finding 01
Apple’s menu groups music by type, and playlists don’t fit how people think about their music. When we stripped the screens down to plain menu labels, people who went looking for Apple’s curated playlists split four different ways.
Research backing: 21 of 53 people never found Apple’s curated playlists, and only about a third went straight to them. When 27 people sorted the music themselves, 18 made just two piles: music they saved, and music picked for them.
Finding 02
Nearly everyone said the menu made sense, including most of the people who had just failed to find what we asked for.
Research backing: of the 21 people who couldn’t find curated playlists, 17 still rated the test easy and 18 said the labels matched what they expected.
Finding 03
Our walkthrough flagged it before we tested anyone. In the first round, people couldn’t tell which playlist was playing. After the redesign, getting to Now Playing was still the hardest task and the most common complaint.
Research backing: 5 of 6 people in the first round couldn’t confirm what was playing. In the second round, about 1 in 4 of 79 people brought up Now Playing on their own.
CarPlay puts your iPhone on the car’s built-in screen and ships in 98% of new cars sold in the United States. Apple Music comes preinstalled on every one of those phones.
That is about as strong a starting position as a product can have, and drivers still open Spotify instead. When we looked at why, it came down to effort. Reaching a playlist in Apple Music takes 4 to 5 taps. Spotify takes 2 or 3. Apple’s own Phone app does its main job in 1. In a car, every extra tap is another moment looking at a screen instead of the road, so the extra effort costs Apple listeners and puts drivers at risk at the same time.
Apple’s own Phone app already does its main job in one tap. We weren’t asking Apple Music to invent something new, just to catch up with Apple.
Six methods over one quarter. We started with our own expert review, then brought in real CarPlay users to test the problem, and tested again after the redesign.
Expert review · defining the problem
Before involving anyone else, we walked the five steps to playing a playlist ourselves, as a first-time commuter would. At each step we asked four questions: will they try the right thing, will they notice the button, will they understand it, and will they know it worked? We judged 6 issues across 20 checkpoints, 3 of them serious, all in the first three steps. Playing music worked fine. Getting to it didn’t. One of those issues was the one that started this project: the controls to open and play a playlist were small and sat on the far right, away from the driver.
Three music apps competing for the same drive (Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music), two carmakers’ built-in systems that skip CarPlay entirely (Tesla, Toyota), and two apps that set the bar inside CarPlay (Apple’s Phone app, Audible).
User research · testing the problem, then the fix
We handed people eight kinds of music content and asked them to group it however made sense to them. Artists and Albums ended up together 89% of the time. Playlists landed with Songs only 57% of the time, and 18 of 27 people sorted everything into just two piles.
A plain-text copy of Apple Music’s CarPlay menu with no visuals, so any trouble had to come from the structure itself. Seven tasks were written as goals (“you want to browse Apple-curated playlists”) without naming where to go.
CarPlay users clicked through a copy of the original design while talking out loud (a think-aloud test), so we heard where and why they hesitated instead of asking them afterward.
A larger group ran three tasks on our final prototype, each followed by two questions: how hard was that, and did the labels match what you expected? This told us how many people struggled, where round one told us why.
TASK
FOUND IT
WENT STRAIGHT THERE
MEDIAN TIME
Search for a playlist by name
100%
87%
3.5s
Find a specific artist
94%
81%
5.3s
Replay yesterday’s playlist
94%
79%
11.1s
Play a saved “Road Trip” playlist
85%
75%
4.5s
Pick up where you left off
79%
70%
6.0s
See all your saved songs
75%
70%
6.5s
Browse Apple’s curated playlists
60%
36%
11.9s
Six of seven tasks landed between 75% and 100%. The seventh dropped to 60%, and it was also the slowest. People didn’t agree on where to start: New first for 41%, Home for 23%, Library and Search for 14% each.
That gap is why we measured what people did and didn’t stop at asking them how it went. A satisfaction survey on its own would have called this menu fine.
We kept CarPlay’s look and changed its structure, so your playlists show up the moment the app opens. The original took 5 taps from the CarPlay home screen to a playing playlist. Our goal was 2.
01
Your recently played playlists sit at the top of the first screen, each with its own play button, so starting one takes a single tap.
Research backing: 41 of 53 people in our tree test said saved playlists are what they mostly play in the car, and Apple’s own Phone app already does its main job in one tap.
02
Home, New, and Radio hold what Apple suggests. A tab called My Music holds what you saved, with Playlists and Artists one tap away.
Research backing: 18 of 27 people sorted music into those same two piles on their own, and in the first round of testing, 2 of 6 stumbled on the word “Library” and suggested “My Music” or “Saved” instead.
03
Larger tap targets, and a small icon on each card showing whether it’s your playlist, a radio station, or live audio.
Research backing: our walkthrough found the playlist controls small and far from the driver, Apple’s own Phone app uses larger targets built for the car, and 1 of 6 people couldn’t tell playlists from albums or audiobooks.
We tested with real users twice: first on the original design to find where people got stuck, then on our final design to see if the fixes worked.
What people ran into What we changed
5 of 6 couldn’t confirm which playlist was playing Designed a tag on Now Playing that names the playlist
2 of 6 tripped on the word “Library” Renamed it My Music
1 of 6 couldn’t tell playlists from albums or audiobooks Added a small icon to each card
“If I really want to know the playlist, obviously you have to click a lot… so then that’s probably not so safe.”
Round one participant
97%
starting a playlist: very easy
71%
getting to a playlist: very easy
68%
getting to Now Playing: very easy
1 in 4
raised Now Playing unprompted
Starting a playlist: 77 of 79 called it very easy, and every single person said the labels matched
Getting to a playlist: 71% called it very easy, and 91% said the labels matched
Getting to Now Playing drew the most “difficult” ratings: 10 people, against 2 and 0 for the other tasks
Only 75% said its label matched what they expected
Our final design had a bar at the bottom showing the current song, but only on the home and My Music screens, and it read “Resume Playing,” which sounds paused. Inside a playlist, where the task started, the bar disappeared. The only way to Now Playing from there was a small icon in the corner, or pressing Play.
Home · the bar is there
Inside a playlist · no bar
Same prototype, two screens. The bar people were looking for wasn’t on the one where the task began.
“I expected there to be a bar on the screen where I can see the music that’s currently playing.”
Round two participant
Our walkthrough had actually flagged this a month earlier. Our early sketch already added a clearer Now Playing icon and label, but the walkthrough couldn’t score it because Now Playing wasn’t one of the five steps we walked. It took real people to show us how much it mattered.
Measure what people do, not just how it felt: round two collected ratings, and the tool marked Task 3 done as soon as someone pressed Play. Next time we’d record whether each task was actually completed and how many taps it took.
Check the task wording against the screen: Task 3 said “You’re viewing a playlist. Go to the Now Playing screen,” but nothing was playing yet. A quick pilot would have caught that.
Close the loop on what we fixed: we never retested finding Apple’s curated playlists, the task that failed hardest, and we never tested the playlist tag we designed after round one.
Test it in a car: every session ran on a laptop or phone. How long someone looks away from the road is the thing that matters most here, and we couldn’t measure it sitting at a desk.
This is the prototype 79 people tested in round two.
Try the prototype
Team 1, IN4MTX 283 · Ava Moosaei (Research Lead), Zhi Qiu (Influencer Analysis), Cindy Chiang (Strategic Analyst), David Yang (UX Analyst), Jarel Mitchell (Report Designer), Michelle Herrera (Integration Lead). An academic evaluation project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple Inc.