HMI ASPECTS OF THE USABILITY OF INTERNET SERVICES WITH AN IN-CAR TERMINAL ON A DRIVING SIMULATOR

Abstract

An experiment on the usability assessment of various control interfaces of an in-vehicle Internet browser, was carried out on the Renault driving simulator with a fictional web site that offers services such as: district map, route planning, electronic messaging, leisure programs, and phone directory. Twenty seven subjects aged from 26 to 69 years carried out this experiment; while performing a car-following task they manipulated an in-car web site by using three control devices: a keyboard, a touchpad, and a voice command. In the quantitative part of the experiment, subjects performed tasks such as writing names, selecting items and moving a cursor on a map, using the keyboard or the touchpad. In the qualitative part, subjects used the in-vehicle web service in a realistic scenario and were allowed to choose the control devices they wanted (voice, touchpad or keyboard). Assessment criteria were speed, distance to the target vehicle, lane position, visual activity, action on the system, operating time, error rate and post trial questionnaire. Based on these criteria, the results showed that browsing while driving seems to remain both complicated and dangerous even when using a simplified browser. However, the results also indicated that, depending on the type of tasks, the different control modes did not have the same efficiency.

Keywords

• In-vehicle man-machine interaction
• Internet browser
• Driving simulator
• Interaction modalities
• Multimodal interface