We have been driving for almost 100 years, but this journey of mobility is about to change once Level 3 autonomy is ready. It is for the first time after we no longer use horses as our personal transportation means to enjoy the freedom of self-driving. A ride with an intelligent system. But still, Level 3 is still away from full autonomous level5. The reason Level 3 autonomy is important is that the driving status of drivers changes from not driving but should still be attentive to the road condition and requires hands on the steering wheel to the state of eyes and mind being free from road conditions and hands off the steering wheel. Level 3 autonomy allows drivers to do anything from watching online content to having a proper conversation with passengers or sending emails. In the past, human-animal collaboration and co-working relationships have already re-educated us on how to again build a relationship with a system you could possibly rely on, but still not yet perfect. We have lost this ability since public transportation and private-owned cars have been popular since FOR T-Model was launched and the cars after it. We have been used to fully relying on ourselves and everything is under our own control, but now again building relationships with non-living systems also requires us partially give out control. We are now feeling strongly about the unknown future of this technology. I have deeply looked into history, psychology, neural science, and also a mental model of how we could make people rely on and build a better relationship with this new autonomous driving Level 3 technology in a few years from now- the mass implementation of Self-driving technology. Currently, most users have difficulties either rationally understanding and utilizing the service and the car or are driven away from the technology by being overly concerned by its trustworthiness. We have designed a service system to fully help people to adopt and embrace this technology for their better benefit.
yuxuan yang
As a designer, I have a wide range of career backgrounds, worked as a car designer in the car industry for almost a decade, and also in mobility-related industry and consulting areas. In recent years I found great exploring joy in self-driving and its technology, also psychological, and anthropology aspects. Science is always the drive for new innovation, but the business strategy is pushing for more possibilities to make discoveries in people's life. As a Christian, I would also enjoy my perspective on inclusivity and a humanitarian approach to business and technology innovation.
There are currently thousands of autonomous users who are either unable to properly understand the intentions or the capabilities of their systems because they were never properly trained on how to operate them. This is bound to only get worse with the highly inclusive mass implementation of more advanced technology and features, as both new and veteran users will not know what to expect
Thus, we chose to focus on how might we catalyze the future self-driving onboarding experience by bridging the reliability and communication gap between the systems and their users, easing the adoption journey?
Through our partnership with the European NIO car manufacturing branch, we were able to develop a service that could overcome these shortcomings, and allow for smoother integration of their products: NIO-NISM
NIO-nism is an onboarding service that catalyzes the efficiency of the Self-Driving (SD) adoption journey and its experience for Hands-off (Level-3) autonomous users.
The purpose of this service is to focus on the onboarding journey for a much wider user base than before, which current vehicles fail to highlight. Through the system, we aim to give users a chance to try out the system for some time, after receiving an introduction and mandatory tutorial around its capabilities, its limitations, how to properly understand its intentions through custom-designed sounds, and the proper course of action for these specific situations. This is done to help users who find it hard to stay updated with the latest technologies.
The service itself is composed of two parts-
Part 1: NIO onboarding,
A well-designed beginner journey in-car to help the user fully adopt the 30-day beginner journey, which is enhanced with a report function in the current NIO APP after each self-driving ride to help users trace logs of the systems in case of doubts or confusion during the trips.
Part 2: NIO APP community,
Utilizing NIO’s current app as a base, the community function allows users to share their concerns and experiences for a better, safer Self-driving adoption journey, as well as build up good feedback dynamic for the autonomous service.
However, this is more of a secondary improvement, as the community function already exists, and our primary focus is around the NIO onboarding experience.
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STEP 3: EARLY EXPERIENCE
After a brief period, and after the user has finished the second section of the tutorial, he is now fully equipped with the knowledge to handle self-driving. Now, to properly get to know the system well the user needs time to build familiarity with it.
The system on the other hand has already him covered. After Each SD system sound or notification, there is a human voice explanation to reassure you what the system is trying to tell you. Apart from that, during these 30 days, the user can use the phone, and through the official NIO app, he can check the system’s performance through the journeys, and how it was making decisions in certain confusing or difficult moments. This makes the autonomous system appear more like a partner in the eyes of the driver, rather than a simple tool. Additionally, the user can connect with the app to the larger NIO community to ask any questions regarding how others have been experiencing their adoption journeys, as well as give and receive tips and feedback for the community.
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STEP 4: FORMATION/INTEGRATION
Finally, at the end of the 30-day trial, the new user mode will be officially over, as the user will have gained more than enough experience to operate all the autonomous features.
The system robot NOMI informs him that he can access the advanced settings, such as turning off the human voice reminder after each system notification sound. The user thinks about the pros and cons in the past 30 days, how the autonomous driving saved helped him during traffic and the more tedious parts of the journey, and also enjoying the connection to the wider community, with other members confirming and supporting raising their voice for the NIO design team to fix bugs and pain points within days. With such a transparent and good service iteration dynamic, the user is convinced and decides to give subscribe to the autonomous features for a couple of months, and he will be prepared to take full advantage of this new technology. However, even if the user would not subscribe at the end of the trial, he will still be equipped with autonomous driving safety knowledge, have the experience to decide on when to get the system later on with no consequences, and will still have access to the community side of the service and connect to the wider community
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Along the way from research to doing experiments with users, we mapped out the user mental model and also the psychology behind this adoption journey. Also the business strategy is well developed along NIO.