Let's Drive

Learn how an interface helps to train and test driverless vehicles and what features are important to bridge the experts and non-experts

Overview

RealSynth is a B2B startup that provides simulations and synthetic ground truth data for AI developments using the latest video gaming technology. Their cloud-based Simulation-as-a-Service platform is a safe and scalable environment to train and test autonomous systems such as driverless vehicles. A user interface that provides domain experts easy access to this technology needs to be designed.

Goals

To identify feature requirements for the cloud-based platform for driverless vehicles and to create a user interface that is intuitive to access the platform to test and train autonomous driving. 

Role

Interaction Designer -
ETH Zürich

Area

UX Research, Interaction design, Prototyping, Low Fidelity, High Fidelity

Team

5 students

Duration

Oct - Nov 2018

Client

Empathize

Kicking off with the brainstorming session to formulate a selection of questions and designing a protocol for the coming interview sessions. During the first interaction with the CEO as a primary stakeholder, we had to identify the feature requirements from the company in the areas of business, technical and user-product interaction

Qualitative Interviews

During the initial discovery phase,  I interviewed the CEO to understand how the product works, how is the value proposition offered and what are the existing challenges or limitations that they face in the current phase of the product development.

• What is the scope of Realsnyth as a product and What are the limitations? 
  "Test for a very specific case (i.e. vary one parameter only), uploading of scenarios are not possible only toggling in the model. The data is delivered but not software, this is the next step for an on-premise solution. Goal is SaS solution (via browser interface)"
  Robert Walter 38 yrs, CEO

Existing interface

After the interview, Robert was kind enough to guide us through the demo of the existing interface of the cloud simulator. This helped us to understand the technical functionalities and how the current information architecture is set up.

Interpretation & Affinity Diagramming

Now it's time to engage the team and helps teams collaboratively analyze research findings, as well as ideas from ideation sessions, is affinity diagramming. Let's put pieces of data, small documented facts, drawings, ideas, and observations onto post-it notes, cards, or pieces of paper and put them up on wall charts, whiteboards, or chalkboards.

The focus is on translating what you’ve organized and understood into practice, rather than just identifying similar ideas.

The next step was to add a category sticky note to represent each group, which helped to segment ideas in different groups. The functionalities are represented in each category. The features of the category are grouped by existing in the interface or the features which do not exists. 

Requirements

• Allows input on autonomous vehicle control via console.
• User must be able to interact with a simulated environment
• "Various" Landscapes with different obstacles to train different algorithm features
• "Easily" changeable settings and overview thereof. 
• Highlights of features benefits for potential investors/customers

Persona Building

 Personas can be created by talking to users and segmenting by various demographic and other data to focus on the pain points of the user. User personas are extremely useful to grow and improve a business, they help uncover the different ways people search for, buy, and use products, so you can focus your efforts on improving the experience for real people and use cases.
 

"How might we help Alice to train her autonomous quadcopter to stop deforestation in South America?" 

Prototyping

The low fidelity mockups are created using Balsamiq mockups and high fidelity mockups are created in Sketch and Balsamiq mockups.

I have inserted the prototypes below where you can interact before/after by dragging with the arrows

Landing Page

The landing page contains a simple call-to-action (CTA) that fulfilled our purpose and value to our target users.

Main Screen

After opening the page, the user should directly be able to interact with the simulated environment (no text tutorial in advance). The user is then guided through the following features in a non-intrusive manner (not necessarily in the provided order). 

Landscape Settings - Selection of Scenario

There are two scenarios implemented for the demo but the interface should allow navigating through hundreds or thousands of scenarios efficiently. 

Vehicle Settings - Segmentation View

Show/hide a ground truth data layer in real-time alongside the raw sensor data of the corresponding sensor (e.g. side by side, overlay, etc). For image data, color-coded semantic segmentation masks are common.

Object Settings - Add Object

A scenario is composed of many thousand virtual objects (buildings, trees, pedestrians, vehicles, sensors, etc). The user must be able to efficiently browse through all those objects and select the desired one. Note that currently only a very small number of objects is exposed to the interface. 

Usability Testing

We guided the participant through the different tasks using a Google Form questionnaire as a protocol and to collect the results. The user performed the various tasks on a Med-Fi Prototype. The user study is described in detail in a separate case study.

The results collected are incorporated towards the final iteration of the prototype, where we created the final concept video, shown in the following section.

Concept Video

A virtual testing ground for your Autonomous vehicle. Realsynth demo contains different real-world scenarios. A tutorial for the demo is included in the user interface guiding you in with the help of the quest. This comprehensive redesign offers Gamified tutorials, an intuitive user interface, a high degree of customizability, and effective sales value.

Key Takeaways

The domain was quite challenging given the technical functionalities and certain basic requirements that were already set. A clean and user-friendly interface was provided with better information architecture. Different proposals were made based on the idea of the storyline. 

1. The offering was shaped with the help of a storyline, where a storyline/tutorial is used to introduce the demo to the user. The demo features are explored via a quest-based tutorial- learning through interaction.
2. The user explores the demo via pop-up messages
3. Let the user be free to get familiar with the demo and show hints for "advanced" settings.
4. User is prompted with hints when an action is performed/event occurs
   

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