IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2023 - 13

Table 1. Task comparison: website versus in-car infotainment system.
Interface
type
Website
In-car
infotainment
system
Typical usage
Web surfing (e.g., search, information browsing,
etc.)
General vehicle operation (e.g., temperature
adjustment, audio control, GPS navigation,
phone calls/text alerts, etc.)
Primary
task
Interface
navigation
Driving
Secondary
task
None
Interface
navigation
The impact of the
usage on users'
physical safety
Minimal
High
features into the system2 can now accommodate
voice recognitionmodules aswell as gesture-based
touch interfaces.3
Despite these advances, many researchers,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
and automobile experts9,10,11 have
addressed serious safety concerns regarding the
current automotive infotainment systems. Specifically,
these systems may disrupt consumers'
normal driving2,12,13 because they distract their
visual attention from driving.3,4,8,9,10,11
In the following sections, the research findings
are discussed in detail to explain factors that
might pose added distractions to drivers and to
describe distracting and therefore unsafe user
experiences in terms of interface design, sensory
cues, and device type.
USER INTERFACE DESIGN AND
IN-CAR TOUCHSCREEN DISPLAYS
Digital interfaces facilitate user interactions.14
Consumers typically encounter interlinked interactive
content and click on or touch one or more
content items (e.g., menus) displayed on a screen
to navigate them. This interactive structure is
fairly ubiquitous. For instance, it can be found in ecommerce
transactions and social media, as well
as in Google searches and in-car GPS navigation.
Over the last two decades, the quality of these
digital user interfaces has been evaluated mainly
based on users' perceived task difficulty,15 overall
usability, and ease of use,16,17,18,19 with a focus
on key design components such as typefaces,20
graphics quality,21 grid,22 a visual span,23,24 perceived
readability,25 perceived spatial density,26
clutter,27 and crowding.28
However, for in-car infotainment interfaces,
the assessment standards must be different from
the traditional UI evaluation criteria. When driving,
the interface users' primary task is not to
January/February 2023
operate the touchscreen interfaces but to drive;
thus, to operate the interfaces, drivers have to
manage both tasks simultaneously.29 Research
indicates that such multitasking requires visual
attention from the user12 and disrupts the primary
task.3,30,31 Therefore, the standards should
be stricter and involve more relevant driving
criteria (see Table 1).
Researchers have recommended more rigorous
approaches to test in-car infotainment interfaces,
such as running tests in more realistic
settings, which may include the use of driving
simulators.8 They also suggested using physiological
measures, including heart rate and eye
gaze.30 Researchers also recommend testing the
driving performance, workload ratings, situational
awareness, and object detection.8
Despite safety concerns, many recent in-car
infotainment interfaces have not been intuitively
designed, require multistep commands, and have
toomany features.7,10,11 Many of them are designed
without much consideration of the drivers' unique
situations. In particular, touch interfaces are not
" ideal " for driving because they require the driver's
visual attention.12 This is likely to divert the driver's
attention away fromdriving and pose a serious
safety risk because of the interface's vision-touch
bimodal nature, which is discussed in the following
section.
BIMODAL NATURE OF
TOUCHSCREENS AND SENSORY
OVERLOAD
Touch and Vision
Touch has an intermodal relationship with
vision.32 Lederman et al.33 suggested that tactile
properties involve visual and tactile sensory cues,
such as spatial distribution and texture. For
13
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