In-vehicle heat-induced impact on the system usability of on-board computer interfaces considering the optimization of scheme presentation order

Abstract

Extreme heat is now a new normal for many cities due to climate change and urbanisation. The heat challenges have generated significant impacts on people's daily functions, including driving behaviours. In-vehicle temperature condition regulate drivers' thermal comfort, responses, and thereby intervening their cognition of on-board computer interface schemes (OBCIS). However, existing studies on the OBCIS usability evaluation have not well dealt with the impacts of ambient temperature and scheme presentation order on drivers' responses. This study addressed such research gaps by empirically analysing respondents' eye movement, including fixation duration (FD) and fixation times (FT) towards 24 typical interface prototypes under six temperature conditions. Moreover, the genetic algorithm (GA) and simulated annealing algorithm (SAA) were applied to optimise the total distance between the prototypes for optimal OBCIS presentation order. The results indicated that respondents' FD and FT generally increased with temperature. The checkerboard type OBCIS, which got the highest usability score, presented the lowest FT at 23 °C, while it exhibited the highest FT at 26 °C. Moreover, after the two optimisation algorithms had been run for 50 times respectively, paired sample t-test showed that GA performed better than SAA in the optimisation work, and thereby the optimal presentation order was determined. This study provides a reference for understanding heat-induced information interaction and OBCIS design. Compared with traditional usability evaluation methods of human-computer interface, this research properly ensures the reliability of the evaluation results in terms of ambient temperature and order effect bias.