Automotive Research in the Public Space: Towards Deployment-Based Prototypes For Real Users

Many automotive user studies allow users to experience and evaluate interactive concepts. They are however often limited to small and specific groups of participants, such as students or experts. This might limit the generalizability of results for future users. A possible solution is to allow a large group of unbiased users to actively experience an interactive prototype and generate new ideas, but there is little experience about the realization and benefits of such an approach. We placed an interactive prototype in a public space and gathered objective and subjective data from 693 participants over the course of three months. We found a high variance in data quality and identified resulting restrictions for suitable research questions. This results in concrete requirements to hardware, software, and analytics, e.g. the need for assessing data quality, and give examples how this approach lets users explore a system and give first-contact feedback which differentiates highly from common in-depth expert analyses.