Presence and quality of navigational landmarks: effect on driver performance and implications for design

Current vehicle navigation systems still predominantly use distance-to-turn information to enable a driver to locate a forthcoming manoeuvre. It has been proposed that the design of driver navigation aids can be improved through the incorporation of landmarks as key navigation cues. However, little research has investigated how the quality of the landmark affects driver behaviour. An empirical field trial in a real traffic environment was undertaken with 48 participants (minimum age 21, mean 44; minimum driving experience three years; mean km driven in the last year 19,000) in order to assess the effect that the quality of a landmark had on driver behaviour when navigating an unfamiliar, complex, urban route. The use of good landmarks (as opposed to poor landmarks or distance information) as key verbal navigation cues resulted in significant improvements in navigation performance, driving performance, and driver confidence immediately preceding a turn. The use of distance information to locate a turn resulted in significantly more glances to the in-vehicle display. Actual or potential applications of this research include guiding the design of effective and safe future vehicle navigation systems

The design of civic technology: factors that influence public participation and impact

Civic technology needs to be better understood in terms of the factors that promote representative public participation and impact. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study of a civic tech platform that enabled the public to provide feedback on public transport to the service providers. The overall aim of this research was to investigate the public's use of a leading civic tech platform, FixMyTransport. The key findings were that: an effective and easy-to-use civic technology platform enables broad participation; data and process complexity need to be removed; factual information can be captured in situ with impacts, consequences and opinions added later; emotions (if important) need to be explicitly elicited; feedback to, and a 'conversation' with, the users is important for engagement, as is a feeling of being part of a community. These findings can contribute to the future design of civic technology platforms. Practitioner Summary: There is a lack of understanding of how 'civic tech' platforms are used and how they may be designed for maximum effectiveness. Multiple data collection methods were used to investigate a well-developed example of civic tech. Effective civic tech can enable broad democratic participation to improve public services

HMI integration for driver systems: INTEGRATE and VIVID

HMI integration for driver systems: INTEGRATE and VIVI

Design advice for the inclusion of landmarks in vehicle navigation systems

The following advice has been developed from results of research studies carried out over the course of the REGIONAL project (1999-2002). These results, and the studies that produced them, are described in more detail in section 2 of this document. It also takes into account limited findings in the existing literature relating to the use of landmarks within navigation systems. The aim of REGIONAL was to support the inclusion of landmarks within navigation instructions by generating advice on: • What landmarks to choose and incorporate in databases • How to use them appropriately during the navigation task • The factors to take into account when presenting landmarks within system

Crowd sourcing of public transport problems

Social sites on the World Wide Web allow increased sharing of ideas and problems. Such online networking includes the ability to report public transport problems and get support for campaigns to improve specific aspects of public transport. One site that offers such a facility provided access to its data on problems that were reported over a 13 month period. These were assessed and comparisons were made to see if those campaigns that got the most support were inherently different to the campaigns that received little support, and to investigate the types of problems that were reported online. Whilst definitive answers cannot be given, there are some suggestions that come out of the analysis and the overall impact on improving public transport accessibility and usability is discussed

Using the travelling task as a tool to define its requirements for elderly and disabled people

This paper describes the methods and tools used by the TELSCAN project to identify the requirements of elderly and disabled (E&D) travellers with various types of functional impairments. A Definition of the Travelling Task for different modes of private and public transport was used to capture the needs of E&D travellers through interviews with experts and focus groups with users. The data collection resulted in a generic specification of user requirements, in general and those specific to telematics, for elderly and disabled travellers. This methodology and data can guide the design of ITS and can provide a stepping stone to capture system-specific data to ensure that the needs of elderly and disabled people are included in the design process

Lead-user needs and trends within sustainable transport

Initiation of the lead user method depends upon successful collection of lead user needs and trends. These pieces of information are determined from secondary sources, and interviews with market and technology experts. Specifically, the trends provide an overview of prevailing issues in the area, and their associative user needs can be useful for understanding the elements which must constitute future products, processes and services. Both of these types of information are essential for identification and recruitment of ‘lead users’, an innovative type of user. This study documents the process of collecting this information within the sustainable transport domain, and subsequently presents the collected future needs and underlying behavioural trends. Finally, it suggests a high-level replication procedure for conducting similar processes within alternative domains

The personal and contextual factors that affect customer experience during rail service failures and the implications for service design

© 2020 The Authors This paper: identifies personal and contextual factors that influence customer experience when service failures occur in rail transport; what is being conveyed through that factor (e.g. older age being used to convey vulnerability); and the implications for future service design. The results are from a thematic analysis of free-text rail passenger complaints (n = 516) reporting service failures that impacted on customer experience. The study differs from existing research on the pertinent personal and contextual factors for public transport service provision in that it: focuses on the passenger experience resulting from specific incidents (rather than evaluative, overall assessments of satisfaction), generates the factors inductively from the data (rather than a-priori) and uses detailed qualitative cases (rather than quantitative survey data). The findings (1) identify some similar factors to those used in previous research and uncover some new factors for both person and context, (2) provide an understanding of what they mean in terms of the passenger experience and (3) indicate how the factors might need to be measured if they are to be used by the rail industry. The paper concludes by using the outcome of an industry-based validation exercise to describe how the findings could be used in future rail services, namely: predicting where the customer experience is going to be sub-optimal, prioritising responses to particular circumstances, and designing services to better meet customer's needs. This exploratory research is timely, given the need for a more passenger-centric approach to service design and future developments such as smart-ticketing, which could potentially enable greater understanding of who is using the rail network and for what journeys

Bottom-up grassroots innovation in transport: motivations, barriers and enablers

There is a growing phenomenon of ‘grassroots’ innovation, i.e. that triggered by individual users or communities (physical or virtual) seeking a solution to a personal or societal problem. This has great potential as a new source of sustainable transport innovations, but has been received little attention to date. This study conducted 16 in-depth interviews and a workshop with grassroots innovators in transport. A detailed thematic analysis of the interview data identified: catalysts for the idea and the motivation behind its pursuit; the barriers experienced (those that were overcome and those that were not); and the enablers that permitted the innovations to continue and to flourish. The paper concludes by identifying the conditions that need to exist for such innovations to be created, developed and exploited in order that their potential for increasing the sustainability of the transport system can be fulfilled

Designing the user experience for new modes of electric vehicle charging: A shared vision, potential user issues and user attitudes

ELECTRIC VEHICLE (EV) uptake has been increasing greatly and steadily over recent years. Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), is an emerging energy system, with the potential to reduce peak loads and support the balance of the electricity grid. To benefit the 34% of the UK population without off-street parking, street furniture charging solutions have been developed. This requires the design of new services and digital interactions for buying, and selling back, electricity to the grid, leading to new customer experiences. The ultimate goal of this research is to understand and design these new user experiences. The overall system is complex, involving energy flows, financial flows, new technology, consumer interaction, and consumer acceptance. To explore the potential issues of a V2G-supported EV charging system and examine consumers’ attitudes towards such system, a mixed-methods approach was employed. Part 1 of this paper specifically explores the creation of a holistic vision of consumers, EVs, street furniture charging solutions, and V2G. A workshop was organised with 22 participants from across the different specialisms within the project team. Consumer motivations, enablers, and barriers were explored. Part 2 of this paper examines consumer attitudes and intention-to-buy based on a scenario of V2G system, which was created with the foundation of the outcome from Part 1. Consumers showed positive views towards EV adoption, while the intention-to-buy V2G-supported EV charging system varied. Consumers tended to be cautious about making a full commitment to V2G packages. This paper also discusses the design implications for future research and practitioners