Dashboard Design for an Autonomous Car

Abstract

In a fully autonomous car - steering, deceleration and acceleration are completely controlled by the intelligence built into it. This leads to a major change in user experience as the driver needs different information and is less involved in the driving itself. We are working on redesigning the user experience of the autonomous car from a holistic user experience perspective of the driver. Our design was driven by a more anthropomorphic view of the car. The driving metaphor being that an autonomous car and the driver are travelling companions. Our work currently is geared towards emulating the key characteristics of this friendship and formulating a design scheme to design each device (and modality within). In this paper we introduce this idea and exemplify some design decisions by referring to a new dashboard for the autonomous car simulator at Stanford. This paper will underline our position that we strongly believe user experience design for autonomous cars needs a tremendous shift towards a more elaborated understanding of user interactions as well as new approaches in order to address the challenges given by the changed experience of the autonomous driving.