Ergonomic product development of in-vehicle information systems

This paper presents a simultaneous engineering and rapid prototyping approach that was applied to conceptualise an ergonomic in-vehicle HMI of an advanced driver information system. Computer simulations of the human machine interface (HMI) and simple representation of a driving task were applied to conceptualise the HMI in an early stage of the project. To face the challenge of a user and safety oriented design of the HMI for this type of system, the approach was chosen to develop an ergonomic HMI of an in-vehicle information system in parallel with the other sub-systems. Different interaction concepts were selected and implemented according to boundary conditions and technical developments in the project and then realised as virtual prototypes. In summary it can be stated that the prototyping approach using driving scenarios as well as computer demonstration/simulation of the HMI has proven to be useful for the conceptualisation of in-vehicles HMI. It has to be mentioned that user tests performed with virtual prototypes lead to applicable results and can contribute to saving costs and time in the development process.