"A New HMI Design for a Hybrid Vehicle. Driver Centred Analysis, Design and Evaluation" is the title of my master's thesis work.

The thesis project was conducted as a part of "Electrification of passenger vehicles" project sponsored by Swedish Energy Agency. During the project me and my thesis partner Peter Celion collaborated with researchers from Chalmers University of Technology and SAAB Automobiles. The main task of the master's thesis was to design, test and evaluate innovative HMI-concepts for a hybrid Saab vehicle. Since hybrid electric vehicles differ substantially from traditional vehicles in many ways, the design of their HMI is a major challenge.

The design process of the thesis work followed an iterative interaction design process. The process started with the user analysis of the hybrid car drivers. After the analysis, several personas were created for the main target groups. Then different scenarios were created for those personas. In parallel to those, a task analysis was carried out to understand the flow of the user tasks. Based on the personas and the scenarios, a through requirement analysis was completed.

After the requirement analysis, 8 different concept sketches were created on paper based on the requirements. Later on these were transferred to digital format in Adobe Illustrator. Several design guidelines were followed at the same time and concepts were designed and evaluated according to them. From eight of the concepts, 2 final concepts were selected based on methods like Cognitive Walkthrough and Concept Selection which we used for assessing our designs.

The fundamental interactive parts of those concepts were then implemented first in Adobe Flash, both for communicating our designs and for trying out the interaction concepts. After further refinement, we implemented the prototypes for the car simulator using C# and WPF.

The last part of the project was to carry out usability tests for assessing and comparing alternative design concepts with potential users in a car simulator using our prototypes.

15 February 2011 - 30 September 2011