Deriving UX Dimensions for Future Autonomous Taxi Interface Design

Advances in autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies mean that driverless taxis could become a part of everyday life in cities within the next decade. We present a user-design activity leading to the development of an experience-design framework for autonomous taxi services of the future based on end-user expectations. We used Mozilla Hubs by MozillaTM as a design collaboration tool to inform Human-Machine Interface (HMI) design for future autonomous taxis. Twenty-five participants joined research facilitators in seven workshops. Virtual reality (VR) environments, or alternately PCs, depicted a roadside scene that enabled participants to discuss the approach, identification, and onboarding tasks; immersion in a 360 -degree video of a taxi interior enabled participants to discuss in-transit, arrival, and exit/payment interactions. Verbal prompts encouraged participants to envision, depict, and discuss HMIs. Analysis identified 12 semantic dimensions of an autonomous taxi user experience to describe a continuum of experiences, for example "functional " versus "sociable " and "conventional " versus "futuristic, " which provided a preliminary framework for experience design. Four autonomous taxi HMI concepts were developed, and the interactions of 53 participants were video recorded for an evaluation study using the dimensions. Significant differences were found between experiences on most dimensions, suggesting participants were able to use the dimensions as a meaningful framework for evaluating HMIs.