Problem Statement
Incorporating autonomous cars into the real world for real users can be quite a daunting task even though they are safer than normal cars. Building trust is not an easy task. To build a user’s trust with an autonomous car, such car needs to be aware of its surroundings while in transit
Proposed Solution
People trust machines when they can predict they will do in a given scenario and when they know how they work. Hence, I set out to design a UI that allows users see what that car is doing in real time and see exactly what the car sees around it while commuting. This will be the digital face of the driver
To ideate and design the product, I first had to identify the current autonomous vehicles market and actors in the market. I also needed to understand the type of customers who would use the product. Although there are no self-driving cars in my country, I had to resort to the use of secondary UX research method so I took the liberty of using Google and vlogers review to understand the user scenario and the pain points better and two things stood out. Trust and information overload! So, the study was aimed at understanding the particular strategies that could solve both pain points
So far, my research has uncovered key areas of opportunity. However, these findings need to logically solve the main problem: providing an ideal commuting experience in a self-driving car. I used my findings gathered during the research process to build two personas who represent the target audience and match their concerns with the solution intended
For this early stage iteration, I had focused on the group that makes up the majority of the user base: two types of Product Users. But because the product is a single entry that is differentiated by roles and permissions, I consolidated the user profiles I created into a single persona. The persona below, based on the UX research, exemplify those roles and helped keep the design process user-centered:
