I was a Research Associate at the Engineering Design Centre, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, working on TASCC, an EPSRC and Jaguar Land Rover funded programme on smart and connected control.
Assumptions about the driver usually describe someone fit, confident and middle aged. That excludes many of the people who stand to gain most from a car that can drive itself, so the research went after the gap.
What I did
- Surveys and focus groups with an inclusive user group, covering everyday driving habits and attitudes to handing control to a machine.
- Studies of what the public already believes about driverless technology, translated into design requirements.
- Design and evaluation of dialogue-based takeover interfaces, and measurement of how people drive in the minutes after control comes back to them.
- Work on UCEID, a method combining ecological interface design with user-centred design for automated driving.
- Collaboration across engineering, psychology and an industry partner, turning findings into guidance a vehicle team could act on.
What came out of it
Around twenty papers and chapters, still appearing in journals five years after I left. Nine of them are chapters in Designing Interaction and Interfaces for Automated Vehicles (CRC Press, 2021), the book that collected the programme's results, alongside journal papers in Applied Ergonomics and Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing and conference papers at IUI and AHFE.
The most cited is the autonomous vehicle acceptance model, a survey instrument for measuring what the public will accept from a self-driving car. The list is on Google Scholar.
The finding I still use: when people expect a system to be more capable than it is, the interface spends its first seconds correcting them, and those are the seconds you cannot afford during a handover.