Photo of a car windshield with a simple user interface projected onto it

RoadWary

Project Overview

As part of a course in accessible design, I worked with a team to create a vehicle HUD which provides directional awareness of important sounds such as honks and sirens. We conducted extensive background research focused on the user group of hearing impaired drivers and uncovered that drivers who are deaf or hard of hearing often adjust their driver safety habits by relying more on their sense of sight.

In designing a solution for this specific user group, we realized that a much wider audience could benefit from this product: for example, drivers who listen to music or podcasts at high volumes. This exhibits the principle of universal design.

Role

Generalist UX researcher/designer as part of a team of 3

Topics

Accessible Design, Physical Interface, Speculative Design

Timeline

6 weeks

Methods

User surveys, competitive analysis, user persona, pretotyping

Tools

Figma, Miro, Rhino, Photoshop, Lumion

Research

During an accessible design course, my team and I chose to focus on on the challenges the Deaf community faces in their everyday lives. We looked into the scope of the problem as well as innovative solutions that already exist to help them accomplish various tasks.

How Big is the Problem?

Pie chart of 5 percent

or 360 million of the world's population has disabling hearing loss

Pie chart of 33 percent

of people over 65 years old are affected by disabling hearing loss

Pie chart of 10 percent

Current production of hearing aids meets less than 10% of global need

The Deaf community experiences a plethora of difficulties, from missing out on movies to experiencing social isolation. The area we chose to focus on is driving, where we feel there is major room for improvement.

How Does Hearing Loss Affect Driving?

While sight is the most crucial sense for driving, a lot of important information comes from directional sound.
Ambulance vector art
Emergency sirens influence drivers to pull over or redirect.
Honking cars vector art
Other cars honking may be indicative of an issue with one's driving or vehicle.
Broken down car vector art
Unusual sounds coming from the engine alert drivers of maintenance problems.

"Drivers who are deaf or hard of hearing often adjust their driver safety habits by relying more on their sense of sight to compensate for the loss of hearing."

This discovery phase brought us to our initial how might we statement we would later set out to solve.

How might we help hearing-impared drivers stay alert by giving them more visual information about their surroundings?

User Persona

Our first step in this next phase was to develop a user persona to keep in mind as we furthered our research and began to think about designing.

Persevering Peter

Photo of a smiling older man wearing a red jacket and sunglasses on his forehead

Age: 49 years old

User type: opportunistic, hard working, exploratory lifestyle

"I love to drive but sometimes my passengers doubt my ability when they discover I'm hard of hearing."

Peter is a full-time warehouse worker living in the New Jersey metropolitan area. He loves cruising around in his Mustang, and recently started working as a driver for Lyft on the weekends to bring in some extra cash. Peter has suffered from age-related hearing loss, brought on in part by his passion for rock concerts. He has limited hearing in one ear and uses a hearing aid, which sometimes affects his everyday activities, especially moving between different environments.

Goals/Needs

  • To navigate through the city safely despite his hearing loss
  • Assure his passengers of their safety while in his car
  • Know what's going on around him on the road at all times
  • Go to events and concerts and have fun with his friends

Pain Points

  • Hearing aid often overwhelms him with sound when driving in the noisy city
  • Being denied the ability to rent or test drive a car
  • Police are usually not friendly or understanding with him
  • Fears that if he becomes involved in an accident, it will be hard to prove he wasn't at fault

User Survey

In order to gain more insight into our core user group, we wrote and sent out an online survey asking questions about distracted driving habits.

We received a total of 34 respondents, only 3 of which indicated an auditory processing disorder. It should be noted here that our responses are skewed toward a younger audience.

Survey Statistics

Music symbol with 77 percent
listen to music/podcasts often or always
Volume symbol with 90 percent
listen at a volume of 5 out of 10 or higher
Phone symbol with 19 percent
look at their phones while driving
Snack symbol with 24 percent
eat a snack while driving
Touching screen symbol with 42 percent
adjust their entertainment screens
Speedometer symbol with 88 percent
check their speedometer while driving
We were quite surprised by these results. It seems that even outside of hearing impairments, drivers are exhibiting behaviors of distracted driving by taking their eyes off the road alarmingly frequently.
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Another question in our survey we asked had to do more specifically with the project idea we were starting to brainstorm.
Ambulance vector art
44% of drivers sometimes or always have difficulty placing where an emergency siren is coming from.
It should again be noted that the majority of our survey participants were not hearing impaired, yet placing emergency sirens still seems to be a significant problem for a lot of drivers.

It was around this time that we realized whatever solution we choose design for Deaf drivers may also be beneficial for the general population. From these insights, we shifted our how might we statement to fit a more universal approach.

How might we communicate critical information about road safety without using sound alone?

Product Exploration

Stylized car logo with the text RoadWary: a visual driving assistant
The idea which we sought out to explore is a heads-up display which converts important sounds like emergency sirens and honks into an easily understandable visual display. This product intends to help hearing-impaired and unimpaired drivers alike.

What is a HUD?

A heads-up display, or HUD, is a device that projects an image onto the vehicle's windshield, ordinarily just beneath the driver's line of sight. It provides essential information without requiring the driver to take their eyes off the road.

We looked at existing vehicle HUDs to uncover what features have already been implemented and which have not.
Sticky notes listing out various HUD features and pictures of how they are being implemented.
While many of the HUDs we looked at do in fact reveal important information, it also became apparent that there is a boundary where it becomes too much. The goal of our project is to better inform drivers of sounds around them, not to overwhelm them with a plethora of information directly in their line of sight.

Low-Fidelity Mockups

After settling in our idea, we divided up our group and each spent time individually sketching out what we imagined the product to look like on paper.
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Sketch of HUD concept showing a car with indicators displaying sound around and directions Sketch of dashboard with HUD and lots of notesSketch of HUD concept similar to a GPS interface
We came back together after our individual explorations and began to work on a final version which would turn out to be an amalgamation of our favorite features from each. Some of the ideas involved more physical hardware, while others mimicked the interface commonly seen in GPS navigation programs.

High-Fidelity Mockups

Sensor

In developing a more fleshed out version of our product, we determined that we would need a sensor in addition to the HUD. The sensor will sit on top of the car and pick up the sounds of the road, process them and send them to the HUD inside the car.

Below is a model of the sensor as well as a rendering of its placement on the car.
Electrical model of sensorRendering of sensor placement on roof of car

HUD

The other essential part of this product is the heads-up display that sits on the dashboard and projects important information onto the windshield.

Below, once again, is a model of the HUD device and a rendering of how it would look in reality.
Clearly labeled model of the RoadWary heads-up displayHeads=up display sitting on a car's dashboard and projecting an interface onto the windshield
Building out and rendering these models was valuable in our understanding of how this product would look and feel in real life, beyond pen and paper.

User Interface Design

We spent a lot of time designing the user interface, which was an important step to evaluate how to best convey the information we needed to. From our earlier research, we determined that we want to keep this interface minimal and only show the information absolutely necessary for the user. Below is the design that we came to after several iterations.
Our final user interface, including a speedometer, directionals, important dashboard indicators and a car with a circle around it showing where sounds come from.
In addition to the directional sound indication, we included dashboard indicators to bring it closer to drivers' line of sight, a simple speedometer as well as the current speed limit (we learned from our earlier survey that 88% of drivers look down at their speedometer while driving), and turn signal indicators (valuable information drivers may miss out on due to permanent or temporary hearing impairment).

The key feature of RoadWary displays a car from a birds-eye view with lane assist indicators and a web of semicircles surrounding it in all directions. These semicircles will change color to indicate noise in a particular direction and multiply depending on the volume. For instance, an emergency siren right next to a driver will show up as 3 bright red bars pointing towards its location.

Validation

We sent out another survey to our users to determine their thoughts on the interface we designed.

Survey Insights

70% of drivers feel a need for lane assist indication.
58% of drivers preferred color indication over uncolored.
"During an emergency I don’t want to count whether it’s 2 bars or 3 bars."
These responses helped us feel validation in our interface. In our final design, we decided to keep the lane assist indication and color the bars, using green to indicate far away noises and red for closer noises.

Pretotyping

In his book The Right It, former Google engineer Alberto Savoia espouses the use of pretotyping techniques, meaning "pretend prototyping." Pretotyping is a way to quickly gauge interest in a product or test its functionality without investing the time and money in creating the real deal.

He describes one of these techniques, the Pinocchio method, as "creating a non-functional version of your product and use your imagination to pretend that it's functional to see if and how you would use it."

This technique proved valuable for our purposes because for a summer course, we didn't have the time to build and program a real, functioning prototype of our product. Instead, I simply printed out our finalized user interface on transparent paper and taped it to my windshield.
Two different sizes of the finalized user interface
I printed out versions in two different sizes and affixed them to my windshield in various locations as I drove around.

Driver's side

Eye level

Fake interface at driver's side eye level

Lower level

6 inch by \6 inch size interface on my windshield

Center console

Fake interface at center console eye level
Fake interface at center console low level
After driving around for a while with each placement, I determined the lower driver's side to be the best position. This UI placed here was easy enough to see without straining but also less obstructive of my view of the road.
4 inch by 4 inch size interface on my windshield

4" x 4" interface

6 inch by \6 inch size interface on my windshield

6" x 6" interface

I determined the 6" by 6" size to be to large, whereas the 4" by 4" was big enough to see clearly but not so much that it was distracting.

Conclusion

This foray into accessible design and universal design was an extremely valuable exercise in empathy and understanding how others experience the world.

My team and I got to a point that we were happy with for a brief summer course, but if we had more time and resources, we would like to build a real functioning prototype, conduct usability testing with hearing-impaired drivers, refine and iterate on the product, and finally release a beta version to the public.
Overview
Research
Persona
User Survey
Exploration
Lo-Fi Mockups
Hi-Fi Mockups
UI Design
Validation
Pretotyping
Conclusion
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© Elon Skolnik 2023
elonskolnik@gmail.com