Touch screen based TETRA vehicle radio: Preliminary results of multi-methodology usability testing prototype

A modern emergency vehicle is the combination of different technologies and single vehicle can contain dozens of user interfaces (UI). Laurea University of Applied Sciences launched on 2010 Mobile Object Bus Interaction-project (MOBI) that defines user requirements for designing emergency vehicles, finding solutions to decrease power consumption, experimenting possibilities to create common ICT-architecture and reduce number of UIs in emergency vehicles. MOBI-project equipped a demo vehicle with the latest technology and a possibility was offered to test new prototype of touch screen based TETRA vehicle radio integrated with the onboard computer. This paper presents a multi-methodology approach for usability testing for touch screen based TETRA vehicle radio where heuristic evaluation was combined with field testing and real users in a moving vehicle. Research result confirms that multi-methodology approach is able to detect key usability problems in early stage of the product development cycle and enables to improve software quality in prototyping phase.