Designing Leisure Applications for the Mundane Car-Commute

Abstract:

Commuting by car from home to work can be very time consuming. We have conducted a study to explore what people are doing, and want to do, while commuting. People use their time in the car on a wide variety of activities with great innovation. There was no unanimous activity that everyone wanted, rather a wide variety of activities were requested. Three different categories of activity were identified which we refer to as mundane, vocational and traffic related. To demonstrate a possible IT service supporting commuters, a prototype based on speech output and a simple input mechanism from a wheel was developed. This service moves sampling of music from the conventional shop into the car. The prototype was informally tested with users, which resulted in a number of improvements. Preliminary user results indicate good functionality, a comprehensive interaction interface.