We Need to Design Autonomous Vehicles for Trust. Here's How.

Fully autonomous vehicles are coming, and technology companies are flocking to invest in the smart car future. Google is set to build 20,0000 self-driving Jaguar I-PACEs this year, while companies like Lyft and Uber are well into building their own autonomous vehicle labs. But despite rapid growth in the development of autonomous vehicles, consumers are still wary of the technology.

This poses a challenge to the UX community. We need to understand the disconnect between the autonomous vehicle technology companies are barreling towards, and the hesitancy users have to actually use it.

As user experience researchers and designers, we’re moved to understand what a user needs, and how a product or service is, or isn’t, fulfilling that need. If a gap exists, it could either be because the product isn’t solving the right problem, or that the product’s experience isn’t designed in a way to help a user get from where they are to where they want to be. We’ve seen this need to help change the mental model of users with autonomous vehicle design.

We need to understand the disconnect between the autonomous vehicle technology companies are barreling towards, and the hesitancy users have to actually use it.

There’s a disconnect between the autonomous driving features companies are putting onto the road, and user’s doubt that they’ll actually adopt the technology. At Particle, we’ve talked to hundreds of drivers, both owners and non-owners of vehicles with automotive features, and we continue to see a distrust of autonomous cars.

Even with the potential for autonomous vehicles to give us more freedom in our schedules, reduce car accidents and fuel efficiency, it only takes one report of a self-driving car losing control to color public opinion. If the future of autonomous driving is underway, what responsibility do we have as UX professionals to attune to that fear?

The answer returns us to user adoption, and in thinking about how we might thoughtfully design an experience to help users take the next step. Across decades, designers have slowly led us to deeply trust autonomous driving features.

Autonomous features like park assistant, automatic braking, and cruise control have long since been adopted as everyday driving features without any hesitancy to use. Now, we have an opportunity to use UX to build the next step towards autonomous features that users can trust.

If the future of autonomous driving is underway, what responsibility do we have as UX professionals to attune to that fear?

Working with clients from Jaguar Land Rover to Virgin Hyperloop One, we’ve found that drivers value two core principles to trust their a mode of transportation to handle autonomous tasks: transparency and control.

For users, there’s a mental jump in trust between cruise control, and a vehicle that is fully self-driving. User experience offers the opportunity to translate the need for transparency and control into visual designs that offer drivers a sense of trust and safety.

UX allows us to see the gap between what drivers need to feel secure, and what the automotive industry is investing in. Designing from user experience principles allows us to explore the steps we need to take to bridge that gap.

Autonomous vehicles will the change the way we navigate our cities and our world. But to get there, we need to think beyond how we might get a passenger from Point A to Point B. We also must design from a space of empathy and relationship building, and explore the ways a design can create trust and transparency between drivers and their cars.