The Role and Potentials of Field User Interaction Data in the Automotive UX Development Lifecycle: An Industry Perspective

TL;DR

This paper explores the current and potential roles of field user interaction data in automotive UX development, highlighting its underutilization and the opportunities for more evidence-based, user-centered design practices.

Contribution

It provides an industry perspective through interviews, revealing the gap between potential and actual use of interaction data in automotive UX development.

Findings

Implicit feedback is rarely used in current automotive UX processes.

Design decisions are mainly based on stakeholder intuition and preferences.

Interaction data could make UX development more evidence-based and user-centered.

Abstract

We are interested in the role of field user interaction data in the development of IVIS, the potentials practitioners see in analyzing this data, the concerns they share, and how this compares to companies with digital products. We conducted interviews with 14 UX professionals, 8 from automotive and 6 from digital companies, and analyzed the results by emergent thematic coding. Our key findings indicate that implicit feedback through field user interaction data is currently not evident in the automotive UX development process. Most decisions regarding the design of IVIS are made based on personal preferences and the intuitions of stakeholders. However, the interviewees also indicated that user interaction data has the potential to lower the influence of guesswork and assumptions in the UX design process and can help to make the UX development lifecycle more evidence-based and user-centered.