To begin this week’s research, I wrote some job stories for my autonomous vehicle project.

• As a pedestrian I want to safely walk without the threat of an autonomous vehicle accident.
• As a passenger I want to get to my destination quickly and without hassle.
• As a person with anxiety issues I want to travel without having to interact with others.

To solve the first problem, I will ensure that the AI of the car is well tested, and that the car makes warning sounds when driving on streets or reversing so that pedestrians are aware of its presence.

For the second, I will create an easily navigable UI, and have the car’s stop button placed inside the car rather than on screen, so that older users who may be unable to use the interface can stop the car, in the same fashion they would a bus.

For the final issue, all actions the user must make will be fully digital or automated, such as hailing the car through an app, and viewing and changing routes through the on screen map within the vehicle.

An aspect of the lecture which particularly interested me was content curation, as it covers a wide variety of content forms, such as physical content in, for example, a gallery or museum, to written content like newspapers and books, and digital content such as digital images, videos, sites and blogs.

For each one of these examples, the purpose of content curation is the same, the content must be easily navigable, and the user must intuitively know how it is to be interacted with, as well as the most relevant content being chosen for display to the user. No matter how informative or interesting the content is, the user may still become confused or disengaged due to poor formatting or design of the journey through the content.#

Finally this week, I created sketches of my autonomous vehicle UI. An idea I came up with was using a sliding wheel at the bottom of the screen for the nav bar, with which the user can swipe to access other parts of the interface. I also considered using voice commands, as it may be quite difficult to interact with the screen while moving. Another solution could be for the screen to have the ability to be removed from its stand and held, so that the screen moves at the same position of the passenger, while being tethered to the stand with a wire, similar to the display devices in an Apple shop.