One of the leading causes of car accidents globally is driver-distraction. In recent years, the car manufacturing industry has pivoted towards digitization of infotainment systems for completing secondary and tertiary tasks opposed to the primary task of driving. These systems rely heavily on visually appealing touchscreen interfaces, which often prove problematic as they are more visually demanding, which in turn can cause cognitive fatigue ultimately adding to the cause of driver-distraction.
By introducing alternative forms of interaction to the current status quo of the automotive manufacturing of touchscreens with emphasis on reducing visual and cognitive load on the driver, we might be able to reduce driver-distractions while simultaneously providing a better User Experience, when interacting with touchscreen based IVIS interfaces to perform secondary or tertiary tasks.
With the growing industry tendency for touchscreen based IVIS interfaces, drivers are more prone to distractions than ever before. While these interfaces are visually appealing, the vast majority requires more visual attention and cognitive capacity to operate than traditional tangible interfaces in older car models. Meanwhile, our initial research found that these interfaces more often than not also provides a poor user experience.
Through multiple iterations of prototypes, we explored alternative ways of interacting with prototypes based on our findings from our initial research and ideation phases.
Our goals was to not only explore different forms of interaction comparatively, but also gradually improve on our design over the course of the three iterations.
For our first iteration, we choose to build two prototypes inspired by industry-standard touchscreen interfaces; the first emphasizing point-touch interactions, and the latter focused on touch gestures. We chose to design two visually similar prototype variants, as we wanted to isolate the forms of interaction for testing subjective User Experience and usefulness with different interaction modalities comparatively.
Our second iteration focused on the concept of multi-finger sub-global touch gestures. Herein by using touch gestures we made interactions more direct, tangible and hedonically pleasing. Additionally, multi-finger interactions are performed using a larger surface area as a touch target to allow for decreased precision and using combinations of multiple fingers to perform different functions within the same area.
For the final iteration, we focused on small prototype adjustments as well as the new addition of multimodal feedback improvement based on our findings from the previous iterations User Testing. These aspects were amplified through a combination of haptic response, audible feedback and visually distinguished sections.
Over three iterations we tested 5 different prototypes comparatively with the purpose of testing the subjective user experience of completing different tasks with different interaction and feedback modalities while driving. Over the three iterations we tested on 17 test participants.
We analysed our findings for each iterations testing through Affinity Diagramming to synthesize our insights and derive action pionts and design guidelines for the following iteration.
Over the course of the three iterations, we tested our prototypes with 17 test participants. Important critereia for our recruitment of test participants were, ownership of drivers license, the age segment for people whom are statistically most likely to buy electric or modern vehicles and lastly, their experience with digital IVIS interfaces.
To ensure consistency and comparability throughout our user testing we developed a testing framework that we consistently refined throughout the project. For this an important aspect was the counterbalancing of the test, as it allowed us to neutrally compare the subjective User Experience of our prototypes.
As our testing procedure was quite extensive, we decided to conduct it in a 1:1 moderated format, where a group member would lead the test following a predetermined manuscript along with each individual test participant, while recording each test for later analysis.
Our research found that the status quo of touch interaction in modern electric vehicles relies too heavily on outdated or borrowed interaction paradigms from mobile or web-based user experiences. However, while multimodal interactions do exist in cars today, the potential of these modalities, such as through touch gestures or multimodal feedback remains largely under-utilized.
The results from our user testing indicates that gestural and multi-finger interaction in combination with multimodal feedback can vastly decrease the degree of visual distraction and improve the hedonic quality of the user experience.
Additionally, when implemented correctly, it can help the user more easily visually distinguish functions and improve error correction while driving.In this way, we explored different interaction modalities through adaptation of HCI practices in a traditionally HMI-driven domain. We argue that this was an effective measure of exploring, validating, and generating knowledge about interactional qualities in the context of IVIS interfaces. However, this approach should be seen as an addition to the existing HMI methods and measures of testing rather than a replacement.
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