Effect of Touch-key Sizes on Usability of Driver Information Systems and Driving Safety

Heejin Kim․Sunghyuk Kwon ․Jiyoon Heo․Min K. ChungDepartment of Industrial and Management Engineering, POSTECH, Pohang, 790-784In recent years, driver information systems (DIS’s) became popular and the use of DIS’s increased significantly. A majority of DIS’s provides touch-screen interfaces because of intuitiveness of the interaction and the flexibility of interface design. In many cases, touch-screen interfaces are mainly manipulated by fingers. In this case, investigating the effect of touch-key sizes on usability is known to be one of the most important research issues, and lots of studies address the effect of touch-key size for mobile devices or kiosks. However, there is few study on DIS’s. The importance of touch-key size study for DIS’s should be emphasized because it is closely related to safety issues besides usability issues. In this study, we investigated the effect of touch-key sizes of DIS’s while simulated driving (0, 50, and 100km/h) considering driving safety (lateral deviation, velocity deviation, total glance time, mean glance time, total time between glances, mean number of glances) and usability of DIS’s (task completion time, error rate, subjective preference, NASA TLX) simultaneously. As a result, both of driving safety and usability of DIS’s increased as driving speed decreased and touch-key size increased. However, there were no significant differences when touch-key size is larger than a certain level (in this study : 17.5mm).

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