Investigating Work-on-the-Move Scenarios and User Experience in Autonomous Vehicles

Driverless automation in the transportation industry will redefine the journey experience of in-vehicle activities and lifestyle priorities shortly; as autonomous vehicles (AV) with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities will handle complex tasks and help in efficient decision making. There is a need for designing for the working professionals as one of the potential early adopters of autonomous vehicles with tremendous scope to generate design solutions complementing vehicle-to-people (V2P) and people-to-vehicle (P2V) interactions and catering to their situational needs. The objective of the research is to understand and evaluate the key touch points within the transit journey map, and the multimodal interactions that can be carried out with the customers along with each touch point activity. The study focuses on passenger-to-vehicle (P2V) and vehicle-to-passenger (V2P) scenarios, passengers’ mental models, and expected professional activities based on passenger-to-passenger (P2P) interactions during and after meetings with clients, and colleagues. The professionals who frequently traveled in business class/first-class cabin train/luxury vehicles for the work purpose were approached for this research study. 15 participants joined the in-depth interview study. One of the central activities focused on in the interviews was asking the participants to role-play the travel scenario and capture their reflections on their travel experiences. The reflections from participants on their travel experiences were collected to understand specific user experience (UX) design parameters for AVs. Emotions, humane courtesy, and the learning curve of new interactions were considered as parameters to analyze the user narratives. The findings demonstrate the need to alternate between two types of interaction modes—relaxation and work. Currently, familiar touch and other interactions with users were suggested to be given priority in work mode compared to glanceable and exploratory interactions prioritized in relaxation mode.