Lessons from Oz: Design Guidelines for Automotive Conversational User Interfaces

TL;DR

This paper presents design guidelines for automotive conversational user interfaces derived from Wizard-of-Oz studies, highlighting their positive effects on user experience and safety, and aiming to inform future in-vehicle CUI development.

Contribution

It introduces a set of human-centered design guidelines for automotive CUIs based on empirical WoZ studies and user behavior analysis.

Findings

In-vehicle CUIs reduce cognitive workload and fatigue.

CUIs increase trust and acceptance among users.

Design guidelines improve safety and engagement.

Abstract

This paper draws from literature and our experience of conducting Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) studies using natural language, conversational user interfaces (CUIs) in the automotive domain. These studies have revealed positive effects of using in-vehicle CUIs on issues such as: cognitive demand/workload, passive task-related fatigue, trust, acceptance and environment engagement. A nascent set of human-centred design guidelines that have emerged is presented. These are based on the analysis of users' behaviour and the positive benefits observed, and aim to make interactions with an in-vehicle agent interlocutor safe, effective, engaging and enjoyable, while confirming with users' expectations. The guidelines can be used to inform the design of future in-vehicle CUIs or applied experimentally using WoZ methodology, and will be evaluated and refined in ongoing work.