The Steering Wheel Project

Nokia’s car products on the market at the beginning of 1999 followed established solutions. They were standalone devices providing hands-free, battery-charging, and radio-mute features. The user interface of a handset was used during driving as well. New ideas had come into play to improve one aspect of these car kits or another, but there was also a conspicuous lack of direction for UI development in the automotive environment.

To create one, it was decided to launch a concept project called the “Steering Wheel.” The goal was to create insight into the design of in-car user interfaces in a midrange timespan, specifically, to outline possible products to be launched in 5 years. Additional goals included finding concrete solutions that could be utilized for immediate product improvement, and increasing general know-how for the user interface and industrial design of integrated car systems. Steering Wheel focused on drivers’ behaviour during driving, as well as the periods immediately before a trip starts and after it ends. Communications solutions naturally were foremost in Nokia’s vision, but the underlying aim was to design communications to integrate seamlessly with the other systems in the car, and with the driver’s information processing needs outside the car.

The year-long Steering Wheel project was launched at the beginning of 1999 and carried out in close cooperation with product marketing, industrial design, and usability organizations. It was divided into three main phases: collecting background information, parallel design and research operations, and integration and testing. Background information was collected with many methods at several points of attack. The project participants became familiar with traffic psychology. They mapped the car manufacturers’ visions of future user interfaces and tested prototypes, commercial products, and integrated car systems. The most significant effort to acquire background information was a 6-week driver observation period conducted in London, Munich, and Salo. During these weeks, researchers actually traveled with 30 drivers and observed their actions during work commutes and business trips.

After the observation-oriented initial phase, design and research were launched in tandem. The main objectives were isolated and, to give the handling of those objectives more depth, several simultaneous interaction design and industrial design exercises were started. At the same time, a test environment was built, and design and user interface solutions were proposed along with interactive prototypes and models to solve the critical usability problems. From this point on the project focused on the design challenges around drivers’ attention sharing between controlling the vehicle and operating in-car systems. Observations also underlined the vast individual differences in drivers’ skills and confidence in using communication devices during driving. These framed the scope of design tasks much wider than we originally assumed.

In the final phase of the project, the best ideas that had emerged in the parallel design phase were incorporated into concept designs that matched and complemented the observed user needs.