Combining WOz testing and ride along video ethnographies: advancing methodologies for autonomous driving car development for mixed traffic environments

Experimental 'Wizard of Oz' (WOz) User Experience (UX) research in the context of Autonomous Driving (AD) car development is becoming more interdisciplinary, human-centric and open to innovative methodological collaborations. In this paper, we demonstrate a mixed-methodological approach to research how people engage with and make sense of automated features that do not yet exist in everyday life contexts. We present how the combination of WOz testing and ethnographic ride-alongs have been developed and how the two different approaches can benefit from each other. We selected two everyday driving examples - emerging from T-junction and changing lane on the motorway - to demonstrate the value of mixing these methodologies. We propose that by building new collaborative test practices, we can create a more everyday-life oriented approach that better attends to people's experiences, imaginaries and projections into possible futures of driving, which is particularly important to incorporate in AD vehicle design for mixed traffic environments.