A computer-aided usability testing tool for in-vehicle infotainment systems

•A software for usability testing of in-vehicle infotainment systems was developed.•A digital driver model was built based on Queuing Network-Model Human Processor.•The software aims to predict the usability including eyes off road time.•Validations show the software could provide outputs similar to the empirical data.

This paper describes the development of a computer-aided engineering (CAE) software toolkit for designers of in-vehicle infotainment systems to predict and benchmark the system usability, such as task completion time, eye glance behaviors, and mental workload. A digital driver model was developed based on the task-independent cognitive architecture of QN-MHP (Queuing Network-Model Human Processor). At the front end of the software a graphical user interface (GUI) was developed that allows designers to create digital mockups of the designs and simulate drivers performing secondary tasks while steering a vehicle. To validate the software outputs, an experiment using human drivers was conducted on a fix-based driving simulator with a radio-tuning task as a test case. Three typical in-vehicle infotainment systems that have the function of radio tuning were investigated (a touch screen, physical buttons, and a knob). The results show that the software was able to generate task completion time, total eyes-off-road time, and mental workload estimates that were similar to the empirical data. The software toolkit has the potential to be a supplemental tool for designers to explore a larger design space and address usability issues at the early design stages with lower cost in time and manpower.