Our latest paper has been published today and Tobias Schneider is presenting it online at the CHI’21! Great work Tobias and the team! Thanks to all participants and especially the students who did a tremendous job building the driving simulator for this research project! The simulator is still sitting in the Arena2036 and waiting for the next user tests, but unfortunately due to Corona we were not able to use it. So all research work in the past year since the beginning of the pandemic had to be done via online tools. Thus we had to created our own online tool (Remote Testing Engine) for user testing. This was also a fantastic job by three of our Masters students! Thanks again to you guys, too!

Here is the abstract of our paper:

In a fully autonomous driving situation, passengers hand over the steering control to a highly automated system. Autonomous driving behaviour may lead to confusion and negative user experience. When establishing such new technology, the user’s acceptance and understanding are crucial factors regarding success and failure. Using a driving simulator and a mobile application, we evaluated if system transparency during and after the interaction can increase the user experience and subjective feeling of safety and control. We contribute an initial guideline for autonomous driving experience design, bringing together the areas of user experience, explainable artificial intelligence and autonomous driving. The AVAM questionnaire, UEQ-S and interviews show that explanations during or after the ride help turn a negative user experience into a neutral one, which might be due to the increased feeling of control. However, we did not detect an effect for combining explanations during and after the ride.

You can find the full version of the paper and a video of the driving simulator here:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3446647

Have fun reading and let me know your thoughts!