Master's Thesis | Alexander Schneider Portfolio

Master's Thesis with a topic:
"User Interaction for mobile In-Car interactive Vehicle Applications"

In that project I had a role of UX designer (UI concept development, prototype implementation) and UX researcher (theoretical investigation, usability study, statistical result evaluation).

It was the most challenging UX project I've accomplished.
Thus, I am very thankful to Maximilian Kautetzky, Diana Zimmer and Dr. Tobias Schwarz for such a great opportunity, their open-minded flexibility, constructive feedback and support during the whole long way.
If you consider to buy a Mercedes-Benz car - do it: its developers invest enormous amount of energy, passion and time into their products to make them perfect.

Because of a Non-Disclosure Agreement I've signed, the following project description will be very short and shallow.

Tasks

In a nutshell, my goal for this project was about to develop three different versions of the MBUX system, then test UX and Usability for them.

MBUX is an infotainment system that was first introduced in the A-Class in 2018. It was a huge step forward because the system allows a user to make his / her time in the car as comfortable as never before. MBUX is highly customizable. Moreover, all vehicle occupants will be able to use MBUX in the future (more here).

Thus, personal preferences and prior experience of other devices usage (e.g. smartphones or PC experience) can influence expectations and quality of interactions with the system. Consequently, it is very interesting how those priors affect the customer behaviour and preferences.

Photos of the system

outcome

Again, because of the NDA I can not share neither my results nor any prototypes I've made. But I can share a piece of personal experience I got during my work - conclusions I did for my next challenges.

In this project I learned following:
- user interview (especially with open-ended questions) is an enormous source of ideas and feedback you do not expect to get. It is time-consuming method, but if you are flexible (empathic) enough and get lucky, it will bring you into your participants shoes much deeper than other tools;
- keeping constant contact with investigated users for feedback creates magic. Each iteration costs time & money for an update. But rebuilding the final project is much more expensive;
- making mistakes and fixing them as fast as you can is probably the best strategy for development, when you do not know the right answer (if even possible) to the question asked;
- the more potential users tested the system (more test-sessions) the higher is a probability of finding a better solution for the broader variety of customers;
- ideas we can get during the pilot study can have a huge impact on the whole experiment. Thus, pilot is a must!
- Sketch is a really great tool;
- if Sketch gets better prototyping abilities (like it did for the design part), it will be a real game-changer for the whole industry;
- Flinto is a great tool for rapid prototyping of small mobile applications. Iterative update of the source from Sketch is still a big pain-point of this software. Also sequential, dependent events are hard to implement with Flinto;
- Material Design (Android) guidelines are really good as guidelines for development;
- Human Interface Guidelines (Apple) are good for developing designing skills and ability to make really good design;
- task accomplishing will always take more time than you assume;
- regular meetings for discussing the progress as long as current obstacles and circumstances (like in SCRUM) is a must. Solve the problem before it actually transforms into a problem;
- feedback from team members can’t be overestimated;
- combining the feedback from professors / academia and industry people is a very powerful development opportunity for the project.

References

Here I mention materials I have used for this project description, which you can find interesting to read for more details.

References:

Master's Thesis with a topic: "User Interaction for mobile In-Car interactive Vehicle Applications"

Master's Thesis with a topic:
"User Interaction for mobile In-Car interactive Vehicle Applications"