Benefits of Usability and User Experience in Automated Driving Mikko Rajanen INTERACT Research Unit University of Oulu Oulu, Finland mikko.rajanen@oulu.fi Abstract—This paper proposes a list of potential benefits of are brought also into the automated driving HMI design and better usability and user experience adapted to automated development life cycle. However, bringing usability and UX driving and autonomous mobility. These benefits could be activities into the software development life cycle in general useful for understanding and communicating the importance have been a challenge since the beginning of the usability of usability and user experience for the success of automated activities over fifty years ago as often the focus is on driving to be accepted by the non-technical public and developing technological solutions rather than on the people becoming mainstream and successful. In this paper, the focus is that will actually use these technologies [10]. Furthermore, on identifying usability and user experience benefits of human- there is still a lot of diversity on the usability and UX machine interaction (HMI) in automated driving context. The professionals’ practices, as well as how they conceptualize goal of the paper is to legitimize the usability and the user experience activities in the eyes of the management of usability and user experience and motivate it for their automated driving application and HMI development management [2], [11]. Nevertheless, there has been a lot of organizations. The user-centered design process focuses on progress making usability improvement activities a users, their needs and requirements. This paper shows that the recognized and integral part of the development process. benefits of better usability and user experience through user- Nowadays many of the development companies centered design can be identified in use context as well as acknowledge the strategic importance of usability and UX, application development context through competitive and see them as potential competitive factors for their advantage, reduced risks, and reduced development costs. success [11]. However, even in these cases, the usability and Keywords— Usability, user experience, benefits, automated UX activities are often amongst the first to be sacrificed driving HMI whenever there is a rush to deliver the product to the market. Furthermore, the development company management may I. INTRODUCTION still see the usability and UX improvement activities as just “nice to have” optional task in projects. In the eyes of these Usability is defined as one of the main quality attributes managers, such an ‘extra’ task is always a potential risk for for applications, software products, information systems and project deadlines and therefore is often among the first to be online services in many international quality standards, cut from the project planning. Often these managers try to which have been developed to offer different focus on justify not investing to better usability through user-centered usability processes and stakeholders [1]. Good usability can design with the argument that the users can be trained and be achieved through adopting user-centered design process, that sooner or later, these users will learn to overcome the performing usability activities (e.g., usability testing, expert usability problems in the system and adapt their work flow to evaluation, prototyping), and by having an overall focus on the intricacies of the software, system or service. However, it usability issues through the entire development process [2]. is also possible that the users simply refuse to learn to use the The importance of good usability has been highlighted also system with poor usability, or to accept and adopt a new in the context of driver-car interaction, where easy to learn, technology, and that the technology that has been developed fast to operate and error-free human-machine interaction and the functionality that has been implemented in the (HMI) has been identified as an important requirement for system with so much cost and effort is never used [11]. safety, satisfaction and acceptance of new technologies in automotive context (see e.g. [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]). Even today there are quite few product development organizations reportedly having incorporated usability Research on human-machine interaction showed that the activities fully in their product development process [2]. One evaluation of the user satisfaction with a certain product, reason for these difficulties is that the benefits of better system, or service had to be expanded with more subjective usability are not easily identified or assessed [10]. Usability aspect of personal emotions and experiences. Since the turn activities have been competing for resources against other of the millennia, the concept of user experience (UX) has stakeholders in the software development projects that do been introduced to take into account the emotions and have objective and convincing cost-benefit data available for attitudes of user about using a particular product, system or management decision making when the resources are service [1], [2]. While usability is crucial in order the users to allocated. Justifying the costs and identifying the benefits of take advantage of the product’s functionality, good UX is the usability and UX improvement activities have been seen needed in addition of good usability to guarantee a product’s as key goals for successfully integrating usability activities success with customers and in the market [8]. into development projects in ICT development [11]. Usability and UX have been recognized as important Furthermore, explicit introduction and justification of user aspects of autonomous mobility acceptability before the first centered design and usability work by managers is important use as well as the acceptance after the first use (see [3], [9]). in the development context, because developers cling to Therefore, it is important that the usability and UX activities status quo and seek to preserve it, by claiming that they Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its author. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). follow the principles of user centred design and evaluation a case study would have been contrasted with the literature while in practice they do not, even if they genuinely desire to on usability cost-justification or usability cost-benefit develop for high usability [12]. analysis to validate especially the benefits identified in the literature [11]. Furthermore, special care should be taken Usability and UX work will be integrated in the when using usability cost-benefit analysis as motivational development context when a strategic decision is made by factor for usability activities, as management can focus on the decision makers to incorporate it into the business and the costs of usability instead of its benefits and get development processes of the organization [13]. Usability discouraged, even though the costs such as interface has many different forms of potential benefits also for the development would be realized in any case [24]. Therefore, it development organization. These benefits include increased is better to focus on usability and UX benefits instead of the productivity due to less user errors and less time spent on complete cost-benefit analysis of usability and UX activities work tasks. In addition to the traditional software [11]. development context, the emergence of online commerce has shifted the emphasis from the advantages of better usability III. BENEFITS OF USABILITY AND UX IN AUTOMATED DRIVING to the penalties of the online commerce site not having good usability. Usability cost-benefit analysis has been identified This paper proposes the following preliminary usability as a potential method for arguing for strategic usability (see benefits for automated driving applications in organizational e.g. [14], [15], [10], [11]). context and use context. This paper addresses autonomous driving applications and HMIs on all SAE driving II. USABILITY COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS automation classification levels from basic warnings and cruise control to no direct human intervention needed during Cost-benefit analysis is a method for assessing the driving and covers different use cases such as privately projects from the investment point of view [16]. This method owned vehicles, communally shared vehicles, mobility on involves making an investment decision by comparing the demand, public transportation, and autonomous delivery estimated costs and benefits of the planned actions. This vehicle. These preliminary benefits can then be further comparison is based on collected and analyzed data refined, validated through empirical and experimental regarding technological and financial aspects of the project. testing, and further refined for example to the context of As a result, the management concentrates the available completely autonomous mobility solutions. These proposed resources in the most useful way on such planned activities usability benefits are based on the existing general usability that have low costs and potentially high benefits, as well as cost-benefit literature (see e.g. [14], [15], [10], [11]), as well finding new strategic openings for their business [10]. The as on a continuous longitudinal literature review on the usability cost-benefit analysis is in practice conducted in the usability and UX benefits that the author has studied for over planning phase of a development project [17]. 20 years from different perspectives and in different contexts While there are many different cost-benefit analysis (see e.g. [10], [11], [15], [24], [25]). Furthermore, the models for different contexts, there are still relatively few proposed benefits are also based on the literature of adapting published models for analysing the costs and benefits of usability and UX benefits into different contexts, such as usability work in general, and they focus on the company open source software development [24], games and software development context [11]. While cost-benefit gamification [25], and on the literature on HMI in driving, analysis has been used in the automated driving context, the automated driving and autonomous mobility contexts. focus has been on analyzing the autonomous mobility A. Usability benefits in automated driving context services and not on the human-machine interaction, usability or UX (see e.g. [18]). 1) Organizational context (development and sales) Increased sales Generally, the five traditional models of usability cost- benefit analysis differ by the focus and perspective they As a result of usability and UX methods and processes, adopt. Mayhew et al. [19] focuses on the benefits that are of the business objectives of the automated driving and its HMI most interest to the audience of the analysis. Ehrlich et al. are well defined, understood, and embedded in the design, [20] focuses on the benefits of usability from the viewpoint especially through user-centered design. The better usability of the vendor company, corporate customer, and end user. will result in increased user acceptability and acceptance of Karat [16] analyses the usability benefits through cost- novel technology and therefore increased level of adoption of benefit calculation of human factors work. Donahue [21] new technology. This may result increased sales and strategic divides the focus between the costs for the development competitive advantage when compared to competitors with organization and the benefits for the customer organization. worse HMI usability (see e.g. [11]). Bevan [22] analyses the benefits of usability to the Reduced development costs development organization during different phases: development, sales, use, and support. The user-centered design makes the whole design and development process of automated driving HMI iterative and There are also other approaches, such as cost-justification incremental, therefore making sure that the critical issues, of usability and UX activities through fear-setting, where the concerns and functionalities are well designed and tested focus is on potential losses of inaction if the technology is with real users before implementation, thus resulting in less not adopted or market is lost due to inferior usability and UX need for later costly changes. Furthermore, this speeds up the of the product, system or service (see e.g. [23]). development of the new technology and time to enter the There is still a need for research studies where usability market (see e.g. [20], [4], [3]). cost-benefit analysis perspective has been employed in and adapted to specific contexts such as automated driving HMI, or where the results of using usability cost-benefit analysis in Reduced training and support costs the level of trust to the new technology, therefore generally decreasing the willingness to accept and adopt the automated The automated driving HMI is tailored and adapted to the driving (see e.g. [29]). Furthermore, errors in automated drivers and not vice versa, by understanding, knowing and driving HMI may have dangerous unintended consequences modelling the expectations and behaviors of drivers. Better and endanger both lives and property. usability makes the automated driving application easier to learn, therefore reducing the need for providing training and Reduced learning effort support (see [22]). Easier learning can also be used as competitive factor [11]. The automated driving application is designed for easy of learning, therefore requiring less learning effort and reducing Easier and faster acceptance and adoption of the potential barrier of acceptance and adoption. Ease of automated driving learning further increases user satisfaction and willingness to adopt new technology (see e.g. [30]). Automated driving is a complete paradigm shift for car users, and all kinds of problems, issues, mistakes and Increased user satisfaction problems with the new technology and its HMI will hinder the acceptance and adoption of automated driving [26]. The potential end-users are accepting and adopting the Better usability will make it easier and faster for the former automated driving application, accepting and adopting the automated driving as a concept, and provide positive active car drivers to accept the automated driving and to adopt it, by allowing the users to see the benefits of the new feedback about them through different means and channels. technology instead of concentrating on everyday problems Positive user satisfaction will have an impact on general and issues emerging from it [26]. Therefore, good, intuitive acceptability of the new technology, as well as to the sales. and error-free HMI allows previously active car drivers to be Increased safety confidently adopt more and more passive role in automated driving and still feel that they are in control. Furthermore, it Automated driving and autonomous mobility can can be argued that the acceptance and adoption of different potentially increase the safety of the driving in addition to levels of automated driving is a crucial step for further increasing efficiency in driving time and costs. (see e.g. [7]). development and acceptability of autonomous mobility Therefore, better usability of automated driving HMI may solutions. help to prevent accidents and other dangers to both life and property. Furthermore, increased safety may make automated Reduced risk of legal liability driving and autonomous mobility more appealing to User errors and mistakes when using automated driving consumers as well as to businesses. HMI may potentially cause accidents, which would carry a B. UX benefits in automated driving context risk of legal liabilities for the developer of the HMI. The 1) Organizational context (development and sales) ethical and legal responsibilities emerging from the HMI design have been highlighted in the literature (see e.g. [27]). Increased brand appeal Better usability reduces the risk of user errors and In addition to fast, efficient and error-free HMI achieved unintentional mistakes made by users, and therefore reduces through usability methods, the HMI can be further improved the liability risks of the developer. Furthermore, this could from UX perspective by making it more visually appealing further reduce the costs associated with injuries and and integrating it as part of the organizational brand. The damages, as well as legal services and insurances (see e.g. customers are more willing to spend money on expensive [18]). products, systems, or services if they consider the brand more appealing. (see e.g. [31]). One example of this Conforming to regulations and ethical principles approach is Apple, which has been focusing in their strategy Automated driving has huge impacts on national and on UX and visual design as important parts of their brand international legislations, regulations, and ethical principles. appeal [31]. Increased brand appeal through better HMI from Better usability of automated driving HMIs through user- UX perspective would help automated driving HMI centered design will ensure that important regulative and manufacturer to gain further competitive advantage over ethical aspects such as accessibility, inclusive design, and competitors with less visually appealing and brand- user empowerment are explicitly taken into account in the connected HMI. design of automated driving HMI, as the users and other important stakeholders can actively participate in the design 2) Use context process from the beginning. By proactively conforming to Increased perceived value the regulations, as well as to the ethical and inclusive While good usability in automated driving HMI is the principles, the automated driving HMI manufacturers could prerequisite for its acceptability and acceptance from the user show that automated driving HMIs do not have to be heavily perspective, an automated driving HMI and its related brand regulated by the legislators (see e.g. [28]). can further be made more attractive for the customers through better UX design. Users attach perceived value on 2) Use context good UX design. 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