User experience heuristics for in-vehicle infotainment systems

Abstract

The use of digital and interactive panels incorporated into various transportation vehicles is a trend that is attracting increasing interest from users. These panels called “in-vehicle infotainment systems” (IVIS) offer a variety of functionalities, from listening to music to visualizing a travel route. However, IVISs must be designed with special care, as they should not distract users from their main objective: driving the vehicle. Given the above, it is essential to design a user-friendly and intuitive IVIS that does not force the user to think about how to use it or create distractions.To facilitate the detection of specific IVIS-related problems and thus improve the user experience (UX), we proposed a new set of 12 heuristics named “UXH-IVIS: user experience heuristics for in-vehicle infotainment systems”. This set is composed of 12 heuristics and was developed using an 8-stage methodology. To create UXH-IVIS, we considered the specific features that describe IVIS, UX factors, and existing sets of heuristics. The set has been validated through a heuristic evaluation in one iteration. In general, the results obtained in the validation corroborate the usefulness of the set, since UXH-IVIS allows to detect severe problems related to this type of systems. As future work, we intend to perform further validations with experts and heuristic evaluations to verify that the proposed set is effective, efficient, and allows the evaluation of different types of IVIS.