The automotive industry today is competitive and the car manufacturers try to attract customers with new technology. At the same time the everyday use of information technology is increasing and this technology will also be brought into the car. Bringing additional technology into the car that is not developed for the special car environment raises safety issues. For this reason, Volvo Car Corporation has chosen to investigate the possibilities of using Bluetooth for connection between different infotainment devices and the car network MOST. Earlier in this Bluetooth project hardware and software for such a Bluetooth node was developed by master students in computer science, but without any concern to the user interface. The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate what could be a suitable user interface for such a Bluetooth node, with special attention to when a cellular phone is connected to it.
A suitable user interface of course has to be adapted to the special context in the car and the task of using a cellular phone, therefore a user analysis and a task analysis was done to get valuable information about the context and its demands. It is also important that the interaction technique used is suitable for the driving context. Although the field of novel interaction techniques was explored, this did not result in finding a superior interaction technique for the car environment. A design proposal was developed and evaluated to find out in more detail what the requirements for a suitable Bluetooth node user interface are. The evaluation revealed some things that should be redesigned before the design proposal is a suitable user interface for a Bluetooth node.  
 

Keywords

Bluetooth, Driving Context, User Interface

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