Autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems could provide around-the-clock, cost-effective, and flexible mobility services without fixed schedules, stops, or drivers and be controlled entirely via digital user interfaces. In the research project APEROL, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Digital Affairs and Transport (BMDV), we looked at the design, development, and evaluation of AMoD systems – in a holistic and human-centered way. The project, with a total budget of € 6,1 million and seven project partners, started in October 2018 and ended in April 2021.
Collaborative and Human-Centered Design of AMoD Systems
Collaborating with our project partners, we analyzed the context of use and prospective AMoD users‘ needs with a citizen’s dialogue in Aachen (organized by HCIC Lab of RWTH Aachen), contextual inquiries, and surveys. Based on the derived insights, we created personas, scenarios, and user journey maps and considered the whole user journey in our design concepts. Here, we looked at several touchpoints of prospective users and the speculative AMoD system, including in-vehicle information displays and mobile apps. In AMoD systems, passengers interact solely with autonomous vehicles via digital user interfaces (UIs). Hence, UIs are crucial for acceptance and user experience.
We also focused on context-based prototyping and ride simulation to consider the (at this time) not-yet-available context of riding in a driverless shared vehicle and evaluate the created concepts with user studies. Furthermore, we created a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of the prospective AMoD service with the cross-platform framework Flutter. The MVP encompassed a mobile user app for both Android and iOS, an in-vehicle information display, a check-in app and a ‚driver app‘ that was used for test rides. The MVP facilitated the demonstration and the evaluation of the AMoD system developed in the overall APEROL project from both the perspective of the user and the service perspective (focusing on route planning and optimization) in a real-life environment with test rides in Saarbrücken and Aachen.
Please also have a look at the related publications and blog articles for detailed information on the project and studies conducted.
Scenario & Wizard-of-Oz Testing in Saarbrücken
As mentioned above, the developed AMoD concept was evaluated on real roads. Therefore, we used a straightforward Wizard-of-Oz setup, which we created as part of the project, and our developed MVP. The video shows the (test) scenario, the MVP UIs, and the setup. Please note that the testing and the video shooting took place during the COVID-19 pandemic.
UX-Design Award – nominated 2020
An early version of the APEROL mobile app design was honored by the UX Design Awards 2020 jury with the ‚UX Design Award | Nominated‘ in the Concept category.
The prestigious award is ‚a global competition for outstanding user and customer experience – core topics that shape all areas of life‘. It honors products, applications, services, concepts, pioneering research projects, and visions in the categories of Product, Concept, and New Talent.
Ergosign GmbH – APEROL (Autonomous, Personal Organization of Road Traffic and Digital Logistics) from UX Design Awards on Vimeo.
Further Information
UX Design Award – nominated 2020 ↗
Activities & Responsibilities
Project lead @ Ergosign.
User research. Citizens‘ dialogue on autonomous driving in Aachen (led by HCIC Lab of RWTH Aachen), online surveys, interviews.
Collaborative UX design. Mobile app, in-vehicle displays, citizen’s dialogue, project and stakeholder workshops.
Prototyping and evaluation. Low and high fidelity prototyping, video-based simulation, wizard-of-oz studies, usability testing.
MVP development. Cross-platform application development by Ergosign.
Related Publications
Lukas A. Flohr*, Martina Schuß*, Dieter P. Wallach, Antonio Krüger, and Andreas Riener. 2024. Designing for Passengers’ Information Needs on Fellow Travelers: A Comparison of Day and Night Rides in Shared Automated Vehicles. Applied Ergonomics 116 (2024), 104198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2023.104198 Download PDF *Note: both authors contributed equally to this paper.
Lukas A. Flohr, Joseph S. Valiyaveettil, Antonio Krüger, and Dieter P. Wallach. 2023. Prototyping Autonomous Vehicle Windshields with AR and Real-Time Object Detection Visualization: An On-Road Wizard-of-Oz Study. Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) (DIS ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596051 Download PDF
Lukas A. Flohr and Dieter P. Wallach. 2023. The Value of Context-Based Interface Prototyping for the Autonomous Vehicle Domain: A Method Overview. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 7, 4 (2023), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.3390/mti7010004 Download PDF
Lukas A. Flohr, Sofie Kalinke, Antonio Krüger, and Dieter P. Wallach. 2021. Chat or Tap? – Comparing Chatbots with ‘Classic’ Graphical User Interfaces for Mobile Interaction with Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand Systems. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction (Toulouse & Virtual, France) (MobileHCI ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3447526.3472036
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Dieter P. Wallach, Lukas A. Flohr, and Annika Kaltenhauser. 2020. Beyond the Buzzwords: On the Perspective of AI in UX and Vice Versa. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in HCI, Held as Part of the 22nd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (Copenhagen, Denmark) (HCII ’20). Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland, 146–166. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50334-5_10
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Lukas A. Flohr, Dominik Janetzko, Dieter P. Wallach, Sebastian C. Scholz, and Antonio Krüger. 2020. Context-Based Interface Prototyping and Evaluation for (Shared) Autonomous Vehicles Using a Lightweight Immersive Video-Based Simulator. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (Eindhoven, Netherlands) (DIS ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1379–1390. https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395468
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