Katherine A.
Work in Progress
B.A Thesis
User Experience | Automotive
2026 - Present
Research Question
What HMI characteristics support drivers in maintaining attention to the primary driving task during high-interruption scenarios in everyday commuting?
Sub Questions:
- What distinguishes high-usability from low-usability HMI among current EU best-selling vehicles?
- How do current production dashboards perform when evaluated against commuter scenario stress tests?
- What does an integrated design response to those findings look like?
Hypothesis
Effective HMI design for high-interruption commuting scenarios requires a layered approach that distributes interaction across modalities according to task criticality and attentional demand — no single interface technology is sufficient, and the optimal architecture draws from multiple existing modalities in a structured way.
TIMELINE
Literature Review
Define Primary Research criteria
Primary Research
Field Research + User Interviews
Define Artefact criteria
Build Artefact
Test 1
Test 2
Final
METHODS
DESIGN FRAMEWORK
Design Thinking
Speculative Thinking
The Double Diamond (Design Council, 2005) framework provides structure to this thesis. The first diamond covers problem discovery and definition. The second diamond covers design development and delivery while Speculative Design principles (Dunne & Raby, 2013) will frame the prototype development, given that the output is a design position and not a production ready system.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Literature review covers peer-reviewed HMI and human factors research, EU passenger car market statistics, and design theory. Key sources have been identified across industry and statistical sources including ACEA and Eurostat, providing both theoretical and contextual foundation.
DESIGN ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH
Self-Immersion and Ethnographic approaches
Primary field research will follow an ethnographic self-immersion approach, a method in design research for generating experiential and observational insight from within a real-world context (Kouprie & Visser, 2009). This thesis will embody self-immersion approach when conducting evaluations at dealerships of EU’s bestselling car brands and better understanding user’s pain points. Vehicles will be assessed with structured observation.
SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS
Semi-structed interviews provide consistent comparison across participants while remaining open to unexpected insights (Adams, 2015). The interviews will be conducted with 7-9 everyday drivers to better understand focus on secondary task behaviours while driving. Data will be analysed through thematic coding to identify recurring patterns in secondary task behaviour, distraction, and unmet interface needs.
PRACTICE-BASED RESEARCH: DESIGN ARTEFACT
Practice-based research is recognised as a legitimate mode of design inquiry in which the artefact itself constitutes a form of knowledge contribution (Candy & Edmonds, 2018). The design output will be a concept HMI illustrated using Adobe suite or Blender, translating the analysis derived from the research findings along with design principles. The artefact will be evaluated heuristically, with limitations especially with the given timeline and absence of formal user testing.