Eliciting potential for positive UX using psychological needs: Towards a user-centered method to identify technologies for UX in the car interior

Positive user experiences (PUX) in the vehicle interior will be enabled by choosing the technologies with the potential to provide such experiences. Design for PUX in general exists, but methods to assess and compare technologies regarding their PUX potential are missing. Building on the insight that fulfillment of basic psychological needs may lead to PUX (Hassenzahl et al., 2010), this paper presents the first iteration of the user-centered method Tec4UXNeeds. Tec4UXNeeds combines VR representations of technologies and half-structured interviews to identify PUX potential of technologies: which basic psychological needs a technology may fulfill and in which use cases the technology could be used to enable need fulfillment. The method is applied for two display technologies in a standardized within-subjects study (n = 27). The study investigates whether the method Tech4UX enables participants to describe whether a technology has a potential to fulfill psychological needs for them and whether the method is specific enough to find differences in need fulfillment potential between technologies described by participants.Preliminary results identified distinct levels of need fulfillment for the first and second display technology (Display on Demand & Holography). Data will be analyzed further using qualitative content analysis. The method will be optimized iteratively in the future.