The purpose of this thesis was to design and evaluate different interaction
concepts for navigating through long lists of information in an integrated
infotainment system. The interaction was made with a rotary haptic devices .
Does the haptic feedback provided through the device affect user performance?
During the course of this master thesis a test environment was built and
designed to examine just that. Through preliminary investigations four
interaction concepts were designed for the test. In the first concept a
haptic click was provided for each list entry, in the second no clicks were
provided, the third concept was designed as a jogg-shuttle and the fourth had
an acceleration script. The test environment was created using Macromedia
Director and a rotary haptic device supplied by ALPS. A usability test was
carried out in May 2006 using 12 participants and the "Labb-Jakob" driving
simulator at Open Arena Lindholmen. The participants got to solve tasks while
driving on a simulated road. The list lengths in the tasks varied between 10
and 400 steps The participants performance was measured in time, turn over
errors and workload. In between each test round the participants were asked
to fill in a NASA-RTLX form, a form designed for measuring the subjective
workload of the participants.
The results showed that participants performed best with concept 1 in shorter
tasks, and performed best in longer tasks with concept 4. The participants
performed significantly worst through out all task ranges with concept 3.
When looking at turn over errors, that is the number of times per task the
target is passed, participants performed significantly better with concept 1
than with concept 3 and better but not significantly so than the other two
interaction concepts. The NASA-RTLX forms revealed no significant differences
between the four interaction concepts.
The results of the test show that interaction concepts in rotary haptic
devices can indeed have an effect on user performance in the human-machine
interaction both to the better and to the worse. An interaction concept such
as concept number 4 which performed well in the test can enhance user
performance. Based on th...
