This week I researched autonomous vehicles, in preparation for the next deliverable. As of now, the leading countries in autonomous vehicle development are the USA and China. The successful Chinese taxi company Apollo Go runs over 400 autonomous taxis in over 10 cities. Some users of this service believe that autonomous taxis will replace personal cars. There is also fear in China, which has a large taxi sector, of job loss due to the rising use of autonomous vehicles.

Apollo Go autonomous taxis are hailed in a similar fashion to Uber and traditional taxis, with a pickup and drop off location being chosen through an app, as of now these are chosen from a list of “stops”, with online card payment. The taxis can only accommodate 2 passengers above the age of 18, and run during daylight hours, due to safety concerns of having children in the car, and possible malfunctions when driving at night in low visibility.

Most companies offering autonomous taxi services have their own charging stations run by human staff, where the cars go to by themselves when low on charge. On an average day a taxi would need to be recharged 2-3 times.

Tesla’s as of now unreleased autonomous taxi includes a touch screen dashboard, where the user can confirm payment details, and choose music. It also shows a map of the user’s journey, and estimated arrival time.

The sailboat exercise this week also helped to identify the main concerns for designing the project, which seemed to be safety, which is understandable, as the project concerns a previously unreleased type of technology which has not been fully tested, and users may be skeptical, and accessibility, which is also an important concern, as driverless vehicles open up travel to a wide range of mew users who may not be able to use traditional methods of transport. Another important aspect which cropped up in this exercise was naturally the user experience when using and booking the vehicle, as in the field of interaction design, the UX must be made as streamlined, simple and enjoyable as possible.

I also received feedback on my smartwatch app design. Some necessary improvements are making the graph larger, or changing its design so the information is visible without numbers displayed, for this I may use the full screen to visually display this information, changing the size of each section comparable to progress towards the day’s goal. I also must remove unnecessary icons and text, and instead include simpler visual or auditory feedback.