As user interfaces move off the desktop, they have become increasingly prevalent in our everyday lives and in one environment in particular: our cars. Private vehicles are used for 91% of all personal travel in the United States (Federal Highway Administration, 2001), with the average American spending about 80 minutes in their car every day — up from about 60 minutes just over a decade ago in 1990 (Polzin et al., 2003). Meanwhile, coinciding with the burgeoning use of secondary devices — cellular phones to navigation devices to PDAs — in vehicles, “driver inattention” has become the primary cause of vehicle crashes (22.7%), ahead of even excessive speed (18.7%) and alcohol impairment (18.2%) (Hendricks et al., 2001). Given the importance of in-vehicle interfaces and their effect on our lives, effective evaluation methods for such devices are sorely needed to determine how they might affect driver behavior and performance. (Author/publisher)
Abstract