Experience prototyping for vehicle-to-vehicle communication context

Abstract

After a history of 100 years in the automobile industry, the concept of the connected vehicle gains shape with the development of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication technology. For prototyping user experiences of V2V applications, designers are confronted with the complexity and characteristics of V2V communication context. Unlike previous methods for envisioning driving interactions, new methods necessitate to understand the experiences both in the vehicle and on the road for envisioning the ubicomp context as a whole. Therefore, I present a designerly method, which combines the vehicle and road perspective through role-playing with low-fidelity materials. This iterative prototyping of the user experience enables designers to easily represent V2V communication situations and build V2V application scenarios with a miniature set of roads and cars with video cameras that are connected to monitor screens. Moreover, these tools support designers to generate ideas, communicate, and evaluate about the complex V2V communication scenarios and its user experiences. A user study with 14 designers and researchers in the ubicomp field yielded methodological implications, and supported design thinking in terms of the three characteristics of the V2V context: (1) V2V context as a social behavior, (2) V2V context as a rich communication, and (3) V2V context as a car-mediated communication. Based on the study, I discuss the implications for prototyping the user experience of the connected vehicle context. By combining the vehicle with the road perspective, my method can help designers to systematically identify and solve the design problems related to various connected vehicle contexts with a holistic view.