EcoCar In-Car Experience
Promoting eco-friendly autonomous vehicle sharing.
Background
The EcoCAR Mobility Challenge is the latest U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition series. The four-year competition will challenge 12 university teams to apply advanced propulsion systems, as well as connected and automated vehicle technology to improve the energy efficiency, safety and consumer appeal of the 2019 Chevrolet Blazer — Specifically for the carsharing market. (avtcseries.org)
This write-up mainly focuses on the first year of competition, when HMI was a new team with a large amount of freedom (for better or for worse.) As we continue to develop in year two, this information will be updated.
Team Leads: Shane Martin, Avery Wolf, Alex Argyle
Year One Leads: Madisen Arurang, Michael Palomo, Scott Tan
Design Tools: Figma, Adobe XD, Smartsheet
Duration: This write-up primarily follows roughly 4 months in year one (March-June 2019). The full project is continuing until Spring 2022.
Specific details in this project are confidential and unfortunately must be omitted. Instead, I am putting more focus on explaining our research and design process.
The Question
The Human-Machine Interface team is working on several projects focused on improving the car user experience. The primary goal is onboarding, showing new drivers how to use the advanced features we are developing such as lane-keep assist, adaptive cruise control, and automotive IoT. As the lead of the in-car experience team, my team is working on dashboard interfaces and infotainment.
Design Question 1: How might we design an in-vehicle interface to support EcoCar’s carsharing features and improve the passenger experience?
Design Question 2: How might we design a user-friendly carsharing platform for EcoCar drivers and fleet owners?
The Plan
To begin answering our design questions, we split our process into three main sections — user research, ideation and prototyping, and finally usability testing and iteration. We were on a relatively tight schedule, but we wanted go to through the entire process so we could cement our plans for the much longer second year of the competition.
User Research 1: Surveys, Interviews, and Competitive Analysis
Exploratory qualitative interviews were conducted with rideshare users and drivers in the Seattle area to understand their sentiment surrounding carsharing, what systems they currently use, how they learned about these systems, and any pain points they had. We examined local services such as ReachNow, Car2Go and ZipCar, and conducted participatory analysis to learn how the product is utilized from the consumer’s point of view. Furthermore, competing products and applications, such as car sharing applications in other cities (e.g. Scoop in the Greater Bay Area), were analyzed to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the services. From there, we learned how we could apply our findings to our development process.
User Research 2: Data Analysis, Key Findings, and Design Recommendations
After the survey and interview data was collected, we grouped findings together to develop personas that represent our potential users. A user journey map of a carsharing user’s experience was created to identify specific pain points and frustrations in the process. Upon identifying our main personas and their respective user journey, we used this data to discern recurring themes. These findings were then used in the ideation phase to synthesize design recommendations.
Ideation, Design, and Prototyping
From here, we examined our research recommendations and create informed design requirements that translated into solution specifications. In this phase, we began drafting our solution and moving from ideation towards hi-fidelity mockups. We translated user needs and pain points into design requirements. We also create user flows and storyboards to see what context the carsharing application would be used in, and designed with the motivation of enabling users to efficiently achieve their goals within EcoCar’s carsharing service.
To proceed with revisions of the UI, we began to develop sketches and low-fidelity wireframes to support the creation of our interactive prototype.
Usability Testing and Iteration
Once we finished creating a mid-fidelity working prototype, we gathered feedback from different stakeholders to iterate upon our solution before developing a final prototype. Half of these users had prior experience using carsharing applications, and the other half were first-time users. Our initial goal was to conduct approximately three sets of usability tests and to gain peer and expert feedback for each.
The feedback we received from the mid-fidelity mockups were overall positive. Some minor tweaks were made to the experience, but the majority of the changes were visual. The most important feedback provided us insight on how to modify how we display earnings and costs, as well as some other aesthetic changes.
Users also expressed a desire to have message and call functionality, so we began to develop and test those screens. We split the message view into current, upcoming, and past bookings, and integrated in a warning feature if one of the renters is driving in a hazardous way. This allows you to quickly contact the driver to see if something is wrong, ensuring their safety and the safety of the vehicle. We also developed a simple messaging screen.
So that’s where we’re at!
Once the previous leads graduated and moved on, another member and I were set to begin leading two sub-teams for the upcoming years. With a solid foundation in the research and design process, we are ready to start it all over with a new team, stretching it into a full year to gain as much insight as possible.
Working over the summer to develop a plan and recruit new members to the team, as of October we have finally begun the research process! With 12 team members from different areas around the University of Washington ready to start exploring, we’re excited to see what we can discover this year!
Thanks for reading! Make sure to check back every once in a while to learn with us as we continue to work on this exciting project.
