Finding the correct incentives that will nudge drivers to improve their fuel efficiency is the key for achieving long-term change in their driving behavior. In this paper we discuss a participant study which is designed to provide insights on driver attitudes, behaviors and habits. This study focuses on residents in the San Francisco Bay area, and analyzes the eco-topic from multiple perspectives such as people's everyday routine, purchasing decisions, and driving habits.

Driving behavior has been trending towards more time in the car and longer commutes. This has fueled the demand for an increasing number of in-vehicle infotainment features, at the cost of the driver splitting attention between the primary task of driving and other secondary tasks. To demonstrate one process we use for generating continuous improvements to the usability of our infotainment systems, we discuss a study where 30 participants were asked to interact with the speech dialogue system of a Volkswagen Group in-vehicle speech system. Participants performed tasks in telephone, navigation, and map contexts. Tasks were timed and videotaped for analysis of three performance measures: 1) Task Completion, 2) Task Time, and 3) participant rating of Task Difficulty. From this analysis, we identified issues that are especially important to the interaction between the system and the driver, which we categorized into a few broad areas: System Organization, Push-To-Talk Functionality, Data Entry, and Speech Commands. Analysis of the issues specific to each category and usability recommendations for each are discussed.

Though legislation is increasingly discouraging drivers from holding on to their mobile phones while talking, hands-free devices do not improve driver safety. We offer two design alternatives to improve driver safety in the contexts of voice-based user interfaces and mobile phone conversations in cars' side tones (auditory feedback used in landline phones) and location of speakers. In a 2 (side tone: present vs. not) x 2 (location of speakers: headphones vs. dashboard) between-participants experiment (N=48), we investigated the impact of these features upon driver experience and performance on a simulated mobile phone conversation while driving. Participants became more verbally engaged in the conversation when side tones were present, but also experienced more cognitive load. Participants drove more safely when voices were projected from the dashboard rather than from headphones. Implications for driver user interface design are discussed.

Spoken dialogue interfaces, mostly command-and-control, become more visible in applications where attention needs to be shared with other tasks, such as driving a car. The deployment of the simple dialog systems, instead of more sophisticated ones, is partly because the computing platforms used for such tasks have been less powerful and partly because certain issues from these cognitively challenging tasks have not been well addressed even in the most advanced dialog systems. This paper reports the progress of our research effort in developing a robust, wide-coverage, and cognitive load-sensitive spoken dialog interface called CHAT: Conversational Helper for Automotive Tasks. Our research in the past few years has led to promising results, including high task completion rate, dialog efficiency, and improved user experience. Index Terms: dialog systems, cognitive load, robustness