Dalila Szostak

Experiencing Autonomous Vehicles: Crossing the Boundaries between a Drive and a Ride

Autonomous vehicles have gained attention recently since research organizations and companies have presented (semi-) autonomous vehicles driving in public traffic. This workshop covers the crossover between driving/riding in (semi-) autonomous vehicles and user experience (UX) research. The focus lies in an in-depth discussion on challenges and potentials for UX in autonomous vehicles. We will explore various areas such as, user experience factors, interaction design issues, entertainment potentials, social driving, and methodological issues. Additionally, we envision building a bridge between the automotive community and the human-robot-interaction community, since we believe autonomous vehicles can be regarded as a very specific kind of a robot. The overall aim of the workshop is to discuss the future landscape for research within and across each of these areas.

2nd Workshop on User Experience of Autonomous Driving

Autonomous Driving has gained attention from academia and industry over the last decades. Research organizations and companies have developed (semi-) autonomous vehicles and first in-situ studies have been conducted. This workshop follows last years first AUI workshop on user experience (UX) and autonomous driving (AD). We would like to widen the conversation on UX and AD based on the results from last year. The focus lies in an in-depth discussion on challenges and potentials for UX and AD among experts and researchers. We will explore various areas such as methodological issues, human factors, entertainment, social driving, and novel user interface approaches. The overall aim of the workshop is to discuss the future landscape for research within and across each these areas.

On the effect of visual refinement upon user feedback in the context of video prototyping

There has been extensive discussion and research surrounding fidelity or refinement of prototypes in paper and software form, especially focusing on how the nature of prototypes influences the feedback that this prototype can help elicit during user testing. We extend this debate to the domain of video prototypes, where use scenarios are acted out on video. This study examines how the visual refinement (a.k.a. visual fidelity) of design representations presented in such videos impacts user feedback. An experiment was performed where two video prototypes were compared, one where the product is portrayed with high visual refinement and the other looking rough and sketchy. Our results could not identify any significant effects upon the number or type of comments returned by users. This finding contrasts widely held contentions relating to fidelity of software and paper prototypes, though it agrees with similar experiments done with non video prototypes. In practice our results support the validity of testing with low fidelity videos and suggest that the choice of visual fidelity in video prototypes should be based on pragmatic project concerns, e.g., whether the video should be used also for communication and the resources that are available for prototyping.

HCI and Autonomous Vehicles: Contextual Experience Informs Design

The interaction between drivers and their cars will change significantly with the introduction of autonomous vehicles. The drivers role will shift towards a supervisory control of their autonomous vehicle. The eventual relief from the driving task enables a complete new area of research and practice in human-computer interaction and interaction design. In this one-day workshop, participants will explore the opportunities the design space of autonomous driving will bring to HCI researchers and designers. On the day before workshop participants are invited to visit (together with workshop organizers) Google Partnerplex and Stanford University. At Google participants will have the opportunity to explore Googles autonomous car simulator and might have the chance to experience one of the Google Cars (if available). At Stanford participants are invited to ride in a Wizard-of-Oz autonomous vehicle. Based on this first-hand experience we will discuss design approaches and prototype interaction systems during the next days workshop. The outcome of this workshop will be a set of concepts, interaction sketches, and low-fidelity paper prototypes that address constraints and potentials of driving in an autonomous car.

Culture and facial expressions: a case study with a speech interface

Recent research has established cultural background of the users to be an important factor affecting the perception of an interfaces usability. However, the area of cultural customization of speech-based interfaces remains largely unexplored. The present study brings together research from emotion recognition, inter-cultural communication and speech-based interaction and aims at determining differences between expressiveness of participants from Greek and Dutch cultures, dealing with a speech interface customized for their culture. These two cultures differ in their tendency for Uncertainty Avoidance (UA), one of the five cultural dimensions defined by Hofstede. The results show that when encountering errors, members of the culture that ranks higher in the UA scale, i.e. Greeks, are more expressive than those that rank low, i.e. Dutch, especially when encountering errors in a low UA interface. Furthermore, members of the high UA culture prefer the high UA interface over the low UA one.

Unwinding after work: an in-car mood induction system for semi-autonomous driving

We present a concept for an in-car system to support unwinding after work. It consists of a mood sensing steering wheel, an interactive in-car environment and a tangible input device. The in-car environment incorporates a basic state that uses color to relax or energize the driver, and an exploratory state that intends to immerse the user into a simulated environment. In the exploratory state, the user plays with a tangible input device allowing the simulated environment to appear. This environment includes images and sounds related to a certain theme. Our preliminary research findings reveal that users felt significantly calmer and marginally significantly better after interacting with the simulated environment. Results from the semi-structured interviews demonstrated that the majority of people appreciated the system and thought it might be effective to support unwinding. These outcomes demonstrate potential in the concept, but testing in a more realistic setting is necessary.

User experience in speech recognition of navigation devices: an assessment

The complex acoustic environment of car interiors lowers the performance of speech recognition of navigation systems. Interaction designers are challenged with the difficult task of creating clever ways to recover from errors. How do these affect the overall user experience? To answer the question, a benchmark study was conducted on 3 commercially available navigation devices. The result is a set of recommendations for speech interface design of navigation devices.

The elephant in the conference room: let's talk about experience terminology

We reflect upon how the ambiguous and often conflicting definitions of experience terminology (e.g., HFE, Usability, IxD, HCI, UX, XD) are impacting our understanding of the field as well as our ability to communicate, collaborate and educate others. We analyze the history of relevant disciplines and discuss the findings of an online survey completed by academics and professionals, which indicates a high variety in interpretation of terms. Further, we discuss surveys of job descriptions and related academic programs, and provide our perspective on the impact of this problem, as well as suggestions on how to begin to solve it.

Relating to speech evoked car personalities

Could an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system with a speech evoked personality change your relationship with your car? Alter your behavior? Would you like it more? Would it be easier or harder to use? Would a snarky or encouraging speech style make a difference? We report the findings of a preliminary 30 participant study using an experiential prototype that used three different speech styles designed to evoke different personalities: Neutral, Encouraging and Snarky. Our results indicate that driving preferences are conservative in practice and were not strongly influenced by a brief exposure to our system; however reactions to the system were more nuanced than expected. We report on some significant results for initial evaluations of desired attributes for embedded agents (p<0.01) and for the ease of use (p<0.016), usefulness (p<0.05) and friendliness (p<0.05) of the prototype system. Additionally, we found a significant upgrade in gas choice (p<0.01) based on the agent making a recommendation.

Entertainment technology in transportation against frustration, aggression and irrationality

This workshop addresses two strong fields within the Mobile HCI community: games & entertainment and transportation user interfaces. Using transportation technology (e.g., a car, plane, or traveling in public transportation) can be frustrating due to crowded streets, delays, and other travelers. Frustration may lead to aggression and negative experiences of other road members and passengers [4] leading to irrational behaviors [6]. Games & entertainment technology offer potential to resolve these negative user experiences. This workshop brings together entertainment and transportation user interface experts, who are willing to understand mobile entertainment technology as a potential solution to improve the experience of all travelers, drivers, and workers within the transportation field. The overall aim of the workshop is to create a common understanding of the challenges of entertainment in transportation, as well as further extend the research agenda for entertainment in this context from both from a scientific and an industrial perspective.