Due to the inherent limitations of WoZ (Wizard of Oz) prototyping, our focus in this next phase is to further validate the effectiveness of gesture interactions, specifically for keeping the driver's eyes on the road, through a functional prototype. Only a functional prototype will have the responsiveness that we'll need in order to accurately assess the usability and desirability of gestural input.

Configurable All prototypes leverage the same gesture and content settings are were designed to be customizable in response to feedback, allowing us to change the gesture mapping on the fly.

Personalized Tailored to each participant across all content types and populated by artists, music genres, news topics, podcasts, and radio, that the participants listen to in order to simulate a realistic experience.

Aggregation A comprehensive experience that includes music, podcasts, news and radio from multiple sources by leveraging available APIs from Spotify, TuneIn and Audioburst.

Value Proposition Statement

Articulating our value proposition helped us to identify the key assumptions that we need to focus our validation efforts towards in our next round of prototyping and experimentation.

I started this next phase with some preliminary benchmark research. After identifying the need for more lean-back interactions we wanted to take a look at living room experiences because the context of the living room requires lean-back experiences that are actually similar in some regards to the car environment.

We were surprised and encourage to see many similar interaction patterns, in particular, the media matrix and top-line recommendations of Android TV.

Swipe between multiple sources of content

While driving, participants could access multiple music sources stacked vertically into playlists that can be browsed by swiping left to right.

Generative content across news, music, and podcasts

While driving, participants could access multiple music stations based on their preferences for news sources and music genres.

Passive consumption of customized content

While driving participants had access to the VPA which provided contextual drive information and tailored and aggregated content. Routines are customized and may be suggested based on driver, time of day, routing or other contextual cues.

Swipe between multiple sources of content

Evolving the cardboard box prototype, we created a functional interface that includes all primary and secondary gestures for Seek and Scan and Stations, without any graphical interface elements

Our four prototypes were code-based functional prototypes with configuration menus. We included configurable gesture settings and parameters.

To better understand the value of personalization and effective aggregation wanted to ensure that our prototypes were personalized to our participant's music preferences and interests, and would include talk media such as news and podcasts. To add talk media we explored additional streaming sources to integrate with and expanded our initial offering to include genres and recommendations from Spotify (in addition to playlists).

We also were using APIs for different content providers and participants were able to log into their personal Spotify accounts.

I also found Audioburst, an Israeli startup that was digitalizing AM/FM radio broadcasts and breaking them down into snackable short 30-40 second clips based on topic type. This allowed us to identify the interests and hobbies of our testing participants in the onboarding interview, and tailor some of our prototypes to suit their interests on the fly.

After a round of testing with 9 participants, we synthesized our research into user insights that would further inform our next iteration. Some of these insights directly impacted our MVP design, while others we felt were relevant to the product roadmap. Included for each insight were ‘next steps’ which were incorporated into our final MVP requirements.

You can read the full report here:

Along with our user needs insights we documented our insights around the gesture interfaces themselves and our observations from our user's interactions with our prototypes. We summarized these observations to help inform our MVP requirements.

You can read more here:

Glanceability

For drivers, their number one job-to-be-done in the car is to keep their eyes on the road. We believe that an interface should be highly glanceable in order to facilitate this need.

Hierarchy

There is a hierarchy to the information that users need when they are using the interface and designing with this hierarchy in mind makes the GUI more glanceable

Responsive

When a user interacts with the prototype, the slightest delay in response would cause confusion, distraction, and user error. It’s important to make Detroit extremely responsive to every user input for maximum control and understanding.

Intuitive Gestures

Our primary gestures were further validated in this phase, they were perceived as useful, natural and easy to remember by our all of the users. Secondary gestures were seen as useful but will require some onboarding.

There was a lot of value seen from our users towards the various prototypes we tested exploring alternative approaches to content aggregation. Rather than pursue these avenues further we narrowed our focus on the core UX/UI of the gesture experience, but significant value remains in exploring both contextually-aware routines and better facilitation of music discovery.

It’s important that the mental model of the Gesture Player is supported and enforced by matching information architecture. This presents a challenge when integrating into an existing design. The information architecture in the music streaming application was different than our prototypes, it introduced the notion of categories as an additional layer. To integrate the gesture player seamlessly the elements are vertically arranged in a way that follows the mental model of the app (category -> playlist -> track).

We ideated on different ways to integrate our gesture player with the existing mobile application and decided on a simple toggle that would allow the users to easily between the legacy player and our new gesture player.

We realized that without the capacity to onboard individuals in testing sessions, we'd need a method to effectively convey our gesture language to new users. We designed an onboarding flow to help introduce this new interface to existing users of the mobile app.

Our final MVP includes important changes based on our most recent insights, including a complete UX/UI overhaul. Since this will was going to be deployed across in a large internal release, we concentrated our efforts during these last few weeks on polishing things up visually and paying attention to every detail.

The “blank screen” prototype was well-received by our users who felt it reduced distraction. However, some more tech-savvy users with more driving experience saw value in the screen because it added more control and understanding. To satisfy both user types the player UI can fade away into an ambient state after a number of seconds, and only show the track and artist. The screen returns immediately when the user interacts with the phone in anyway.

When listening to spoken word content like podcasts, the user might want to skip forward/back 15 seconds.

Here, a two-finger swipe left or right scrubs the track by 15 seconds.

It will come back immediately after the user interacts with the phone.

We want our gesture interactions to be completely free of tap targets but for infrequent interactions, like exiting the player, this presented a challenge.

We opted for an onscreen element and tap target that requires a long press to initiate. To help novice users an onscreen hint is presented when a single tap on this tap target occurs.

We validated in the first phase of this work the importance of voice in the car. But beyond the car, conversational interfaces and smart speakers are the fastest-growing categories of consumer technology and voice is being integrated into everything. Consumers will expect access to their VPA of choice and desire a connected experience where access is ubiquitous across their products.

A unified language seemed important to establish so users could seamlessly move between devices. To demonstrate this vision, we modified our interface for both real and imagined devices across our clients' hardware ecosystem.