12: Adjunct Proceedings - Automotive User Interfaces and ...

Figure 1. Contextual inquiry in one participant’s car.
3. RESULTS
The study generated 497 ideas in 6 categories: macro-driving
activity (such as going home, traveling), micro-driving scenario
(such as traffic jam, highway driving), supporting driving (such as
ACC), information consuming (such as accessing internet,
communication), entertaining (such as listening to music/radio),
and others (such as traffic accident). In these ideas, 69 of them
were related to traffic jam and we chose one idea and finish a
concept design: Jumping Notes.
Jumping Notes was one of the proposals in the study. In the
approach of Jumping Notes, we identified one issue in the “traffic
jam” scenario: “The drivers wanted to know the reasons caused
the traffic” from 29 participants’ conversation, such as “I feel sad
for I cannot know what happened. If I can talk with the drivers in
front of me, I can know it.” From this conversation, we produced
one idea: a communication system in the jam using NFC in car.
We drew a storyboard to describe the use case of the concept (See
Figure 2).
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Adjunct Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and
Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI '12), October 17–19, 2012, Portsmouth, NH, USA
Figure 2. Story board of “Jumping Notes”.
Figure 4. The Usage flow of “Jumping Notes”.
Based on the story board, we designed the concept: Jumping
Notes (Figure 3). Jumping Notes was a small application in
central controlling display. The driver can write his/her message
on a virtual note in the centered display in car and send it to the
front drivers by the NFC in car. The message can deliver in the
jam site and build up a temporary social network within the
jammed drivers. The drivers can share their information and
communicate with each other by the “notes”. Figure 4 shows the
usage flow of “Jumping Notes”.
Figure 3. The “Notes Delivery” Screen in “Jumping Notes”,
designed by XY Wang, D Xie, et al.
As a design concept, Jumping Notes provides a possible solution
to communicate within drivers in traffic jam by using NFC.
Meanwhile, there are also other possible patterns to communicate
in such scenario. For example, the information also can be directly
transferred to each driver by a traffic information system. All
these concepts should be tested in real scenarios and evaluate the
effect of them. Currently, Jumping Notes presented with prototype
in Chinese version only, which have been adopted by Nokia
Research Center (Beijing) and is applying the patent now.
4. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
Traffic jam is an appropriate context for car-to-car social
communication. In the study, we proposed the concept solution
“Traffic Jam” in such context.
Social communication in car is a very important topic and
exploring the automotive UI design is the main work for the
possible chance towards future. We will continue to the
innovation design on the basis of the research findings and find
the actual opportunities in practice.