How to Measure UX and Usability in Today’s Connected Vehicles

Besides hard factors like horsepower or consumption, today’s connected cars need soft factors being available as criteria for purchasing decisions. User experience (UX), as one of these soft factors, is essentially influenced by services available inside the vehicle. Almost every new vehicle offers a variety of mostly Internet-enabled services to improve the driving experience and to make customers happier. One challenge is to make UX measurable regarding experiences and knowledge inside the vehicle. It has been researched what influencing factors significantly characterize the evaluation of in-car UX. A combination of assessment of relevance, usability testing of pre-defined use cases as well as gathering of quantitative parameters helped create a characteristic variable as a measure of UX inside vehicles. The final evaluation tool is to allow the formation of a holistic opinion about experiences and knowledge inside vehicles and to enable a comparability of UX of complete vehicles as well as of developmental states. Ultimately this not only supports customers in their purchasing decision process, but also manufacturers developing and optimizing new and existing solutions.