Designing Toward Minimalism in Vehicle HMI
This addresses the challenge of reducing driver distraction in vehicle HMI design, though it is incremental as it applies an existing minimalist philosophy to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of determining essential information for vehicle human-machine interfaces (HMI) by proposing a minimalist design approach, demonstrating through a case study on speed display that 87.6% of people request speed information but humans can estimate it well, especially at lower speeds, suggesting it may not be essential.
We propose that safe, beautiful, fulfilling vehicle HMI design must start from a rigorous consideration of minimalist design. Modern vehicles are changing from mechanical machines to mobile computing devices, similar to the change from landline phones to smartphones. We propose the approach of "designing toward minimalism", where we ask "why?" rather than "why not?" in choosing what information to display to the driver. We demonstrate this approach on an HMI case study of displaying vehicle speed. We first show that vehicle speed is what 87.6% of people ask for. We then show, through an online study with 1,038 subjects and 22,950 videos, that humans can estimate ego-vehicle speed very well, especially at lower speeds. Thus, despite believing that we need this information, we may not. In this way, we demonstrate a systematic approach of questioning the fundamental assumptions of what information is essential for vehicle HMI.