Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

In-Car Contextualised Search on Tablets
Ashweeni K. Beeharee
Dept of Computer Science
University College London
Gower Street, London UK
A.Beeharee@cs.ucl.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
In the last few years, an increasing number of portable
devices have entered the vehicle, creating opportunities for
a number of services and applications targeting drivers and
passengers. This is likely to lead to an information
overload for the vehicle occupants – with safety
implications if the applications are targeted to the driver.
Therefore the ability to explore information safely in such
applications becomes not only important – but safety
critical. Generally the search functions in such application
use of the “search engine interaction model” which is not
optimal for in-car usage. In addition, the interaction and
visualization in those applications do not account for
passengers as potential users.
In this paper, we present the SafeTRIP Info explorer which
uses an innovative interaction and visualisation model for
in-car usage. Preliminary results of in-car field trials
evaluating SafeTRIP Info Explorer have generated
encouraging results. These are presented and discussed.
Keywords
Tablet, Search, Information Exploration, UI, SafeTRIP
INTRODUCTION
While in-vehicle services and applications for drivers and
passengers have been around for over a decade, the last
few years has seen an impressive growth in this area due to
advances in portable devices and mobile communication.
The most popular service is personal navigation support,
which over the years has grown to include information
beyond map and route – information about traffic, points
of interest, hotels, petrol stations, restaurants, weather, etc.
While the availability of such information is useful for
drivers and passengers, they are integrated with the
navigation application on devices with relatively small
screens. It makes both information search and access to
rich detail difficult and dangerous - if operated by the
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Automotive UI 2011, Nov 29-Dec 2, 2011, Salzburg, Austria
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driver on the move. In addition, it disrupts the use of the
device as a navigation tool. Indeed, it is becoming more
and more common, for applications running on nomadic
devices (e.g. tablets, smartphones) to be used in the vehicle
for this purpose, however in general these are not designed
for in-car usage – and therefore suffer from limitations (for
instance, long textual presentation of information which is
difficult to read on the move).
A survey with drivers in the context of the SafeTRIP
project revealed that there is need for 1) content -
information with rich level of details (including embedded
multimedia) 2) better search mechanism – as current textbased
searches are seen as limiting. It also emerged that
for practical and safety reasons, many drivers delegate the
task of searching and information access to a passenger or
use the device to search when the vehicle is parked.
Through the use of tablets it is possible to address the
unmet needs of drivers. In this paper, we present the
design for the Info Explorer service on the SafeTRIP
platform – capable of delivering rich geolocalised
information to vehicle occupants. We equally present
findings from the in-car evaluation of the UI and
interaction design. The paper concludes with
recommendations for in-car application design.
RELATED WORK ON INFO EXPLORATION AND IN-CAR
UI
Information Exploration
Traditional information exploration through search engine
result pages (SERP) is primarily designed for navigational
search, or for simple information tasks (such as checking a
fact on Wikipedia). However with more complex
information problems, when users want to get a broader
view and consult different sources or different aspects of
an information problem, the search experience using
SERPs is far from ideal. Even map based applications with
search capabilities – such as Google Map on Android -
still use this paradigm on tablets.
Figure 1 shows the screens when petrol stations are
searched on the Android Google Map application. The
result is presented as a list of petrol station (with address
and an image) and corresponding markers on the map.