Browsing the information highway while driving: three in-vehicle touch screen scrolling methods and driver distraction

Distraction effects of three alternative touch screen scrolling methods for searching music tracks on a mobile device were studied in a driving simulation experiment with 24 participants. Page-by-page scrolling methods with Buttons or Swipe that better facilitate resumption of visual search following interruptions were expected to lead to more consistent in-vehicle glance durations and thus on less severe distraction effects than Kinetic scrolling. As predicted, Kinetic scrolling induced decreased visual sampling efficiency and increased visual load compared with Swipe, increased experienced workload compared with both Buttons and Swipe, as well as decreased lane-keeping accuracy compared with baseline. However, Buttons did not significantly excel Kinetic with any metric but on subjective ratings. Based on the results, we do not recommend the use of kinetic scrolling with in-vehicle touch screen displays in the manner used in the experiment. Instead, page-by-page swiping seems to suit significantly better for in-vehicle displays due to its systematic nature and low levels of pointing accuracy required for scrolling the pages.

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