Team
2 UX Designers, 2 Industrial Engineers
Date
January 2025 - May 2025
My Role
UI/UX Designer UX Researcher
Industries
Transportation, Vehicle Manufacturing
Overview 📝
This project involved the research, design, and rigorous evaluation of IRIS, a prototype for an in-vehicle infotainment system (IVIS) created to combat the significant safety risks of driver distraction. Modern touchscreen interfaces in cars often increase cognitive load and divert a driver's attention from the road. Our team designed IRIS with a focus on streamlining common tasks, balancing touch and physical controls, and reducing visual clutter. Through a comparative usability study against a leading competitor's system, IRIS was proven to be quantifiably faster, more efficient, and easier to use, demonstrating a clear path toward safer in-vehicle interface design.
Problem❓
The widespread adoption of touchscreen infotainment systems in modern vehicles has introduced a critical safety challenge. By 2020, 97% of new vehicles in the United States featured a touch-sensitive screen. While convenient, these systems have been shown to increase the risk of a car crash by up to 4.6 times, a risk factor greater than fatigued driving.
This combination of factors results in substantial human and economic costs, underscoring the urgent need for more intuitive and safer interfaces.
User 👤
To ground our design in real-world frustrations, we conducted 1:1 interviews with a diverse group of licensed drivers. This research revealed several key user needs and pain points that directly informed our design principles.
Process ⚙️
Our team followed a structured, four-phase process to move from identifying the problem to validating a solution.
Discovery & Research
We began with foundational research, including a literature review and 1:1 interviews with drivers to gather qualitative data on their experiences and frustrations with existing IVIS.
Ideation & Principles
Based on our research, we established three core design principles: optimizing task efficiency, balancing touch with physical controls, and minimizing visual clutter. These principles became the framework for all subsequent design decisions.
Prototyping
We designed and built a high-fidelity, interactive prototype in Figma called IRIS. The prototype focused on the three most common driver tasks identified in our research: communication (texting/calling), navigation, and music playback.
Evaluation
We conducted a formal, within-subjects usability study with eight participants, comparing IRIS to a simulated GMC infotainment system. We measured quantitative and qualitative data across several key metrics: Task Time, Tap Count, Lostness, Cognitive Workload (NASA-TLX), and Perceived Usability (SUS).
Final Design 🎨 & Rationale 🤔
The final design of IRIS directly addresses the user needs and challenges identified during our research phase.
Outcomes and Impact 📈
The comparative usability study produced statistically significant results, validating that the IRIS design is a superior and safer alternative to the baseline system.
These outcomes demonstrate that a user-centered design focused on efficiency and simplicity can lead to a direct and measurable improvement in driver performance and safety.
What I learned 💭
Designing for Diversity 🫱🏻🫲🏾
The biggest lesson was the importance of designing for a diverse population. Our participant data showed that prior confidence with technology was a greater predictor of usability scores than age, reinforcing the need to create interfaces that are intuitive for everyone, not just "power users". We also learned that even with a strong design, there will always be limitations and it is nearly impossible to design a single interface that 100% of users will love.
Limitations 🚧
The study's primary limitations were the small sample size (8 participants), the lack of a real-world driving environment (testing occurred in a quiet, stationary room), and a prototype that only addressed three main tasks. This controlled setting does not fully mimic the dynamic and distracting conditions of actual driving.
Future Recommendations 🔮
If this project were to continue, the next steps would be to expand the prototype to include more functions (like climate controls), test the interface in a high-fidelity driving simulator or a real vehicle, and recruit a much larger and more demographically representative sample of participants to strengthen the results.
