Evaluating Visual Display Designs in Vehicles: Advantages and Disadvantages of the Occlusion Technique

Over the last few years the amount of in-car visual displays has steadily increased. Despite of positive aspects of additional systems it is important to make these systems as safety as possible. A method to evaluate the design objectives of quick and reliable information acquisition is the occlusion technique. In this paper we describe the technique and report experimental results from several evaluation studies. We found that the occlusion technique reliably discriminates between simple and complex visual displays. We also found that the occlusion technique reliably discriminates between dialogues that facilitate resumption after an interruption and those that do not. The implications of these results and the applicability of the method are discussed.