Designing for Passengers' Information Needs on Fellow Travelers: A Comparison of Day and Night Rides in Shared Automated Vehicles

Shared automated mobility-on-demand promises efficient, sustainable, and flexible transportation. Nevertheless, security concerns, resilience, and their mutual influence—especially at night—will likely be the most critical barriers to public adoption since passengers have to share rides with strangers without a human driver on board. As related work points out that information about fellow travelers might mitigate passengers' concerns, we designed two user interface variants to investigate the role of this information in an exploratory within-subjects user study (N = 24). Participants experienced four automated day and night rides with varying personal information about co-passengers in a simulated environment. The results of the mixed-method study indicate that having information about other passengers (e.g., photo, gender, and name) positively affects user experience at night, whereas it is less necessary during the day. Considering participants' simultaneously raised privacy concerns, balancing security and privacy demands poses a substantial challenge for resilient system design.

Lukas A Flohr, Martina Schuß, Dieter P Wallach, Antonio Krüger, Andreas Riener