Computer-Aided Usability Evaluation of In-Vehicle Infotainment Systems

Abstract

This paper reports the development of a computer-aided engineering (CAE) software for human machine interface (HMI) designers to predict and benchmark the usability of in-vehicle infotainment systems. At the front end of the software a graphic user interface (GUI) was developed that allows HMI designers to create digital mockups of designs and setup the tasks for simulation. At the back end a digital driver was created for simulating the driver cognition and performance based on the cognitive architecture of QN-MHP (Queuing Network-Model Human Processor). The software is able to simulate a driver performing in-vehicle secondary tasks (e.g., tuning radios) while steering a vehicle, make quantitative predictions of the driver’s task performance and workload. To validate the software outputs, an experiment was conducted on a driving simulator with two typical in-vehicle infotainment systems (a physical panel and a touch screen), and a radio tuning task was used as a test case. The results show that the software is able to generate task performance and workload estimates that are similar to the empirical data from human participants.