The Digital Driving Experience
The digital experience in cars is advancing rapidly. With Car Play, touch screens, and AI the experience is becoming more and more digital.
I joined a team of UX designers at Utah Valley University to ask and answer some questions about this new digital space in the car industry. Our main questions: how do you create the best possible digital experience in a car? And how do you do that safely?
Research
We used the Audi TT as a basis for our design. Some primary functions of the TT include voice recognition, a digital screen behind the steering wheel, and a knob between the front seats that recognizes touch. We kept both the voice recognition and digital screen for our redesign, but we left the knob behind. The knob did have interesting functionality. You could write on it with your finger as part of the search function displayed on the screen behind the steering wheel. It could also be used for navigation on the screen. We felt that this knob introduced too many different motor functions when you are trying to drive safely. It took your hand off the steering wheel. Since the steering wheel provided buttons for navigating the screen, we felt we didn’t need the knob for navigation and we got rid of it in our design.
Matrix
This research begged the question, “what are the most important functions for a car?”
To answer this question our team created a matrix of the most important functions for a car.
We concluded that there are some things that are absolutely essential (like a speedometer and indicator lights) and some things that are just fluff (radar detector and dash lighting themes). Then you have things in between that are needs and cool selling features. To determine what to include from that list, we created a journey map. But first, we had to determine who was taking this journey. Meet Troy.
Troy’s Journey
Troy represents our target audience. Based on research, we found that most people who buy an Audi TT are young, single, successful, and interested in sports cars. The number one incentive for Troy is achievement. Therefore his frustrations revolve around getting the best experience quickly and without much effort on his part. He has other things to occupy his mind and his time.
From here we sketched out Troy’s journey from work to home on sticky notes, starting with Troy leaving work and finishing when he arrives in his garage. Our finished journey map looked like this:
As we worked on the journey map, we realized the most stressful situations on the road have to do with safety. Therefore, functions that make driving safer become the most important functions in a car. This includes functions like lane assist, backup cameras, and auto parking. Because our redesign of the Audi TT, we estimated that Troy’s emotional stress would be lower during potentially dangerous situations than it would be without these functions. This lowered stress results in safer reactions to situations.
Conclusion
Though our project was far from over, mapping out Troy’s journey helped us identify functions from our matrix that were needed to create a good digital experience in the Audi TT. We found that most of our functionality focused on safety and we realized that, even though some digital experiences can be distracting, when designed correctly digital functions in a car can actually make your drive safer.
