Summer Sprint 4: What’s in a Name?
Building out the team’s final prototype and user testing it in a simulated autonomous vehicle environment.
The Product
As the team nears the eighth and final month of our capstone project with 99P Labs, we are proud to introduce our product — Orbit! Why “Orbit”? As HCI practitioners, we approach the design and research process with the user in the center. Our decisions and intentions revolve, or orbit, around the user. The final product of this capstone is no exception — a multi-component, SaaS(software-as-a-service) system that revolves around passenger needs.
Orbit’s multi-modal form allows information reinforcement while capitalizing on each modality’s inherent properties for seamless delivery. For example, a mobile application affords opportunities outside of the vehicle, audio interfaces communicate information through non-visual senses, and built-in screens display dense information regarding the trip. These flows work hand-in-hand for a contiguous experience.
The Prototype
Orbit holds the culmination of almost a year of research with participants from a wide variety of backgrounds, needs, and jobs to be done. At the core of this product are four principles that we relied on to guide design decisions and modality choices: discretion, familiarity, inter-passenger dynamics, and modality.
Discretion
While this word often catches people off guard in relation to autonomous vehicle technology, it is at the core of what we believe to be crucial to a user’s experience in the future of autonomous people movers. Since these vehicles are shared among potential users who do not know each other, it is of the utmost importance that passengers’ needs for privacy and safety are maintained. Additionally, many passengers don’t want to be all eyes on a screen their entire ride, but want to read a book or zone out during their commutes. Discretion of feedback and information allows these desires to be fulfilled while in transit.
The team took inspiration from a few faculty members whose research has focused highly on the concept of ‘nudges’ when developing the final prototype. With discretion in mind, it was important that notifications were intentional and not overused to where users became desensitized. Additionally, for less severe notifications, we made the team decision that they should ‘fold in’ to the user interface, not requiring the cognitive load or effort of a user acknowledging them. On the contrary, high-risk situations such as an emergency, will notify users with multiple modalities and senses, and will require acknowledgement in order to close out of them.
Familiarity
Familiarity with both route and transit type heavily influences a user’s experience. Throughout generative research the team did, time and time again we discovered the importance of recognizing passenger differences such as a tourist versus a regular commuter. A principal we honed in on for our final prototype was familiarity, and more specifically, allowing users to build familiarity and adapting to the level they currently possess. While a new user should be prompted with more guidance and help, a more familiar user might want to zone out and only be notified due to a true emergency or their stop arriving.
Inter-passenger Dynamics
Inter-passenger dynamics is a multidimensional relationship between number of and proximity to fellow passengers and how that impacts a passenger’s perceived sense of safety. Our original hypothesis was that a large portion of safety concerns involve a driver’s ability. This hypothesis was not supported through multiple qualitative data points where passengers’ attention was more focused on distancing themselves from other passengers or not wanting to in an overcrowded vehicle.
Orbit allows passengers to request specific seating prior to boarding an autonomous vehicle. We hypothesize that passengers will be given a sense of agency when it comes to where they are seated on a vehicle and where they are located in relation to fellow riders.
Modality
Modality of information mimics the organic ecosystem of attendants users have created from navigating through public transportation. Users rely on their personal devices, signage, built-in infrastructure, operators, and even other passengers for information when they need it. This ecosystem allows users to pick and choose the most efficient and accessible modality for them.
Orbit pulls inspiration from this organic ecosystem of attendants and replicates it through a mobile application, built-in screen, and audio communication. Our goal with this set-up was to provide many venues of exploration when seeking information in order to provide both accessibility and ease-of-use. We hypothesize that when a passenger can get the information they need without calling a human, they will feel a sense of confidence and safety in the system. Yet, when the situation is urgent or reaches a certain threshold, the option will still be there.
User Testing
For the final step in Sprint 4, we will take Orbit out on the road to test with everyday commuters! Utilizing a Wizard-of-Oz approach to testing, we plan to simulate an autonomous vehicle by using a partition to block the driver of a passenger vehicle from view of the participant. Using tablets on the back of seats, tele-present usability testing moderators, and a remote prototype operator, we will get users as close to a real shared autonomous vehicle experience as possible. Stay tuned for the results of this research as we work to test our hypotheses and designs to ensure they are bringing safety and confidence to this new generation of AV passengers.
