Filling the User Skill Gap Using HCI Techniques to Implement Experimental Protocol on Driving Simulators

Programming activities are performed not only by programmers but also by end-users in order to support their primary goals in different domains and applications. End-users do not have formal training in programming, so interaction environment and systems are needed, which could account for user skills. The objective of our work is to fill the gap between the user skills and the goals they want to achieve using driving simulators. This paper presents the results of a research in which we have proposed a solution for the primary users of the driving simulator to design and implement experimental protocol. We have used the user-centered design (UCD) technique, conducted a user survey, and proposed a solution, in which we have categorized the Interface of the driving simulator into three sub-interfaces based on the skills of the users. These interfaces are Experiment Builder (Nontechnical persons), Template builder (for technical persons) and Experiment Interface (for any user to run as experiment). A prototype based on this concept is developed and some feedback were collected from end-users. Our results indicate that, users can implement an experimental protocol without having programming skills using our proposed design.