EcoCAR First-Time Use Design Process

Designing a new in-car experience to quickly onboard new users.

Background

The EcoCAR Mobility Challenge is a U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition. The four-year project focuses on connected and automated vehicle technology to improve the energy efficiency, safety and consumer appeal of the Chevrolet Blazer, specifically for the carsharing market.

Team Lead: Shane Martin
Members: Theresa Tran, Sebastian Priss, Rylie Sweem, Jenson Yuen, Varun Chawla

Defining the Problem

The Human-Machine Interaction team is tasked with developing new methods to address first-time use in a car-sharing environment, with a focus on semi-autonomous vehicle features developed by our engineering team.

The issue revolves around users who are unfamiliar with advanced features like adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist in new vehicles. In a car-sharing context, we cannot expect the user to be properly informed on how to use all of these features. Lacking this knowledge not only means the driver cannot use the vehicle to it’s potential, but it may also pose a safety risk.

The ultimate goal was a solution that effectively onboarded new car-sharing drivers to the advanced features within the vehicle, ensuring informed and safe operation during their rental period.

Getting up to speed

Our first step was to perform a literature review on researched in-car technology, from dashboard buttons to gesture controls. This was to help inform our design decisions within the in-car medium.

We divided topics and created presentations on the state of in-car design.

Topics included the “visual brain”, gesture controls, eye tracking, and fully autonomous systems. Important discoveries included:

• Fitt’s law to inform distance to target within vehicle
• Saliency maps to determine optimal button and element location
• Gesture controls to improve safety

Next, a competitive analysis was performed on how different car manufacturers approached the dashboard design process.

We took a look at how different manufacturers oriented displays, interfaces, and buttons.

We analyzed the dashboards and infotainment systems of Land Rover, Audi, BMW, and Tesla. Some key takeaways from each manufacturer include:

• Importance of tactility for button recognition and input feedback
• Use of multipurpose buttons to reduce clutter and confusion
• Integration with apps to allow seamless connection with vehicle

Integrating “Connected and Automated Vehicle” feature onboarding

Testing out the car ourselves gave us a good sense of what we were working with.

Now that we had some ideas to base our designs off of, we wanted to work at the real question at hand — integrating the semi-autonomous features into the car experience and educating users on first-time use. We first took a look at how other manufacturers handled this information.

Splitting by manufacturer, we were able to get a good look at the design landscape.

We found many cars had no formal method of educating the user at all besides the physical manual. Many relied on the dealership to educate. At most, manufacturers would post educational videos online or in their apps. With that in mind, we created a survey for drivers to learn their experience with these features and how they have would like to learn about them.

An example question from the survey. We provided an “other” option on many questions to gather more opinions.

Targeted at a wide variety of drivers, 30 questions were given to 80 participants to get an understanding of three main topics:

• Understanding and confidence of advanced vehicle features
• Perception of audio, visual, and haptic cues to indicate feature feedback
• Opinion on education capability within ride-sharing vehicles

Along with learning about optimal placement of features and how we can use different types of feedback to indicate them, we found that 70% of drivers would find an in-car education system worthwhile. One users said:

I would like that, I think — but it would have to be quick and optional — something I can return to later. When you first jump into a rental you’re just interested in getting the heck out of there.

Similar feedback was common — that education is helpful, but has to be non-intrusive and dismissible. With this in mind, we started working on storyboards on how we can educate users.

Though our artistic abilities vary, the thought is what matters!

A number of ideas were generated from these storyboards, including:

• Integrated video tutorials on infotainment
• Virtual manuals with features ranked by most recently used, paired with descriptions and diagrams of the features
• Conversational assistant to answer questions
• Audio and visual cues used to indicate feature locations and how to interact with them

To converge, we used these ideas to generate a number of design requirements. We agreed that an effective system will have:

1. Multiple ways to access information
2. Readily available access to car feature information
3. Able to easily understand how to turn CAV features on/off
4. Clear and convenient onboarding experience
5. No requirement of additional in-person support

With these requirements in mind, we started generating new low and mid-fidelity wireframes.

Quick prototypes were used to generate a discussion on feature layout.

From here, we continued to iterate further working with a style guide that was created concurrently.

Further work was done to bring the design up to date.

These focused on the idea of an “intelligent manual” that kept advanced and recent features up top, each providing a description, diagram, and video to suit different learning styles. This incorporation was discovered through our survey results.

We also took a look at an app-based approach to onboarding. An app is required to book and carry out your rental experience, so this felt like a natural integration.

Creating a list of app and car experiences.

A literature review was performed on the best ways to handle onboarding for mobile apps, and insights included:

• Use animations to hook and highlight features
• Allow flexibility in completing education
• Only educate what is necessary

After deciding the flow and going through iterations in the same process as the in-car experience, we generated some mid-fidelity wireframes of the app.

We tested out onboarding in a number of ways.

This app introduces these vehicle features as soon as the user first creates an account, while following insight from research to make these optional with the ability to return at will. We experiments with two different options:

1. A “conversational” interaction with animations and friendly instruction from the system, as seen in the top.
2. A more formal interface focusing strictly on providing descriptions, videos, and diagrams with higher information density, similar to our infotainment screen.

With these two designs created, we wanted to make an informed decision on how to move forward. We had to decide on one concrete and integrated design, be it an app, in-car experience, or a hybrid. To ensure the right decision was made, we created a new survey.

A sample question of driver values when learning.

This 15-question survey was sent out to over 50 drivers, focusing on the following:

• Current methods of car education
• Learning style preference
• Learning medium preference (manual, phone, in-car, etc.)

We performed a full analysis on these results, creating a document of purpose, limitations, key findings, and impact. Some main takeaways included:

• When learning something new, they value efficiency, followed by accessibility, flexibility, and then variation in learning modes
• Majority are visual learners (90%), followed by physical, verbal, and then aural
• Mobile app design: Excels when considering accessibility and learning ahead of time
• Infotainment system design: Excels when considering the learning styles of majority of respondents (visual and physical)

These discoveries did not provide a clear answer in favor of either design, instead suggesting a hybrid approach to be the most effective.

Combining our ideas

As a team, we began to ideate how we could structure this hybrid system. We started with Google Jamboard, a tool that allowed us to quickly ideate and share ideas.

Jamboard allowed a collaborative environment when we couldn’t be in-person to throw the sticky notes on the whiteboard.

After going through several steps of ideating and then converging, we felt confident of the base features and general flow of this combined approach. We began to sketch and further describe our ideas.

These sketches helped us visualize the interaction between systems.

We discussed the similarities and differences between our scenarios, creating a general outline of what was agreed upon. We also generated a feasibility matrix to assess feature priority between feasibility and value to the user.

A value/feasibility matrix helped us pinpoint the most effective features.

With a defined direction and general flow in mind, we set out to establish user journeys of our own interpretation of this system.

A simple flow gave us insight on how a user acts from start to finish.

These user journeys encapsulated the whole process of using our hybrid solution, mapping user emotion and action throughout the processes. These journeys further emphasized the needs of some features, namely the ability to skip and provide a number of options to the user.

With these journeys in hand, we took a step back and looked for the similarities and differences between them to further converge on our space. We created a list of differences to facilitate a discussion around what we can move past and the best approach to move forward.

Next steps

This progress marked the end of autumn quarter. While I’m graduating, my team will continue moving forward. They will be taking what we learned so far to continue the design process for this hybrid prototype. Moving from concepts to reality, the final product will be a fully-interactive prototype that can be tested both in the app and vehicle. Our app development team has also already started preparing efforts for future development and implementation. I’m excited to see what they accomplish!