Multi-touch Based Standard UI Design of Car Navigation System for Providing Information of Surrounding Areas

Recognizing current location and surrounding areas is one of the default tasks to utilize car navigation systems. Due to the information and communication technologies, features in in-vehicle navigation systems are getting complicated and require more drivers’ visual attention. This research aims to develop UI design for enhancing drivers’ performance in the situation of recognizing and exploring surrounding areas with car navigation systems. In order to make drivers’ eyes on the road, a standard feature definition and efficient operation methods are required. First of all, standard features are defined by analyzing top-selling navigation systems in Korean market. Drivers’ can get route guidance from their in-vehicle system and personal handheld devices. However, the differences amongst the systems make drivers confused and waste time. The development of standard features of car navigation systems can reduce drivers’ cognition load. Secondly, multi-touch interaction methods and drivers’ behaviors are investigated in order to develop basic rationale to introduce multi-touch operation to a car navigation system. Current systems in market except smart applications adopt tactile and single-touch based interaction methods. These methods require more visual workload than multi-touch based methods in certain cases. User research has been conducted in tandem with researches of standard features and multi-touch interaction to figure out problems and their needs regarding to exploring surrounding areas in relation to current location. As results of this research, TF (Task Flows) of a multi-touch based standard UI design is suggested. The UI design can offer more values to drivers in terms of the amount of information with efficient and less eyes-on-the-system operations.