Design of ergonomic dashboards for tractors and trucks: innovative method and tools

Designing highly usable and ergonomic dashboards is fundamental to support users in managing and properly setting complex vehicles, like trains, airplanes, trucks and tractors. Contrarily, control dashboards are usually intrusive, full of controls and not really intuitive or usable. This paper focuses on the design of ergonomic and usable dashboard for specific classes of vehicles, like tractors and trucks. Indeed, trucks and tractors are both vehicles and operating machines, and their control is particularly complex. Indeed, the driver contemporary drives and checks if the machine is working properly. The paper proposes an innovative methodology to design highly usable and compact dashboards inspired by human-centered design and ergonomics principles. The study started by shifting the attention from the machine performance, that is the conventional engineering approach, to the human-system interaction quality, according to a new, transdisciplinary approach. The methodology proposes to combine virtual simulations with human performance analysis to support the design at different stages, from concept generation to detailed design, until testing with users. The methodology uses virtual environments to create digital twins of both driver and controls, making users interact with virtual items and predict the type and nature of interaction. Within virtual scenarios, different configurations of dashboard controls can be easily compared and tested, checking the frequency of use of each control and measuring the achieved human performance related to postural comfort and mental workload. The study adopted the proposed methodology to two industrial use cases focusing on the design of ergonomic dashboards: the former is referred to tractor dashboard and armrest, the latter refers to truck dashboard and seat. Both cases demonstrated that the new methodology allowed improved comfort, higher usability, higher visibility and accessibility, better performance and reduced time for machine control. The study demonstrates how a multidisciplinary user information integration can drive design optimization.