No abstract

User-centered design (UCD) methods for human-machine interfaces (HMI) have been a key to develop safe and user-friendly interaction for years. Especially in safety-critical domains like transportation, humans need to have clear instructions and feedback loops to safely interact with the vehicle. With the shift towards more automation on the streets, human-machine interaction needs to be predictable to ensure safe road interaction. Understanding human behavior and prior user needs in crucial situation can be significant in a multitude of complex interactions for in-vehicle passengers, pedestrians and other traffic participants.While research mostly focused on addressing user behavior and user needs, the inclusion of users has often been limited to study participants with behavioral inputs or interviewees prompted for opinions. Although users do not have the knowledge and experience as professional designers and experts to create a product for others alone, unbiased insights into the future target groups’ mental models are a valuable and necessary asset. Hence, with stronger user participation and appropriate tools for users to design prototypes, the design process may deeper involve all type of stakeholders helping to provide insights into their mental models to understand user need and expectation.To extend current UCD practices in the development of automotive HMIs, our work introduces a user-interactive approach, based on the principles of participatory design (PD), to enable users to actively create and work within design process. A within-subject study was conducted based on evaluating users’ trust within an interaction with an AV and subsequently configuring the corresponding HMI. The scenario focuses on the interaction between a pedestrian (user’s point of view) deciding to cross path with an automated vehicle (AV, SAE L4). The AV would show its intention via a 360° light band HMI on its roof. The interactive simulation offered users hands-on options to iteratively experience, evaluate and improve HMI elements within changeable environmental settings (i.e., weather, daytime) until they were satisfied with the result. The addition of participation was provided by an interface using common visual user interface elements, i.e. sliders and buttons, giving users a range of variety for real-time HMI configuring.A first prototype of this interactive simulation was tested for the safety-critical use-case in a usability study (N=29). Results from questionnaires and interviews show high usability acceptance of the interactive simulation among participants as assessed by the system usability scale. Overall usability was rated high (System Usability Scale) and frustration low (NASA-TLX raw). Moreover, the interactive simulation was rated to have above average user experience (User Experience Questionnaire). Appended feedback interviews gave valuable insights on improving the simulation user interface, offering different design opportunities within the simulation and a wider parameter space. The short design session time shows the limit of customizability options within this study but needs to be further investigated to determine optimal range for longer evaluation and design sessions. Based on the study results, further requirements for PD simulative environments to assess limits for parameter spaces in virtual environments are derived.

The field of journalism has always had many facets: from entertainment to information, from politics to fashion, and from hyperlocal to global affairs. With digitization, the profession finds itself in new working situations and requirements. Journalists are expected to feed the news engine 24/7, to thrive on social media, and to represent the fourth estate while working under everlasting time pressure. News organizations have increasingly hired computing-savvy staff for their news- rooms, such as developers, designers, and audience analysts. As journalism enters the age of automation, it will stay in constant transformation. This adventure can only succeed with great people.As young journalists about to start our own careers, we conducted this study to understand the facets of journalistic skills in the digital age.This report sheds light on contemporary professional skills and competences relevant in newsrooms and their supporting divisions. We set out to grasp the changing profession with its long-standing tradition as a multi-faceted, skill-related vocation. We collected and analyzed 527 job ads of 17 incumbent broadcast legacy, print legacy and online-only news outlets in the US, UK, and Germany over three months in the summer and fall of 2021. About 1.5 years into the pandemic, the data collection period covers a critical phase of reconfiguring practices, “when news work routines demanded coordination among a diverse set of journalists and techno- logists” (García-Avilés, 2021, p. 1255). Our report presents an overview of skill demand, skill profiles, and working conditions of major news organizations in large media markets. It provides insights into employability for people who want to work in journalism and it offers implications for journalism educators that train those who will shape the future of journalism.

More and more studies in automotive research and development are conducting user-centered development in the emerging field of external humanmachine interfaces (eHMI) in virtual reality (VR). As time, cost and risk are decreasing with progressively affordable sophisticated VR technologies, researchers have shifted to virtual testing. Within this context, they use a variety of methods and technologies to develop new designs but so far little examination has been done towards validity of virtualization and description of the technical setup. As level of immersion is one of the current pillars in VR and technology evolves rapidly, study setups differ a lot in recent years, resulting in poorer comparability. In this paper, our goal is to review the current generation of VR studies in automotive eHMI development and extract in the sense of a lessonslearned approach best practices with regard to their VR setup. For that, we assessed a total of six current studies published between 2017 and April 2020 in automotive eHMI development to extract lessons learned from study designs and virtualization setups. We took a look at hardware and software used as well as study procedure. The results allow us to find useful conclusions on automotive eHMI development practices in VR.