Nissan Autonomous Vehicle Research & Design
Research and design for AV robo-taxis and robo-shuttle services for Nissan Research Center Silicon Valley (NRC-SV)
Nissan's Seamless Autonomous Mobility project, developed with the NASA AMES Research Center, needed to understand how passengers actually behave when interacting with ride services — before designing the interaction model for robo-taxis and robo-shuttles.
I was brought in to research the passenger-vehicle relationship in the context of autonomous vehicle services in the Mountain View and Sunnyvale, CA area.
Approach
The interaction between a passenger and an autonomous vehicle had no established pattern to design from. Existing ride services — Uber, Lyft, company shuttles, public transport — each had their own passenger behaviours, and none of them mapped directly to a driverless context.
The research direction was observational first: document how passengers actually behave with existing services, then extract the interaction moments that would persist in an autonomous context.
Hundreds of passengers observed across Sunnyvale and Mountain View transit points
I ran contextual observation studies with video support at train stations around Sunnyvale and Mountain View. With expert Anthropologists and video-researchers from the Nissan Research Center, I observed and analysed the behaviours of hundreds of passengers interacting with Uber, Lyft, local company shuttles, and public transport services.
Moderated interviews surfaced the passenger expectations no observation could capture
Alongside the field observations, I ran passenger- and driver-oriented moderated research, interviewing several users of ride services. The observation data showed what people did; the interviews revealed what they expected, feared, and assumed — the internal model that would need to transfer to a vehicle with no driver.
A behavioural framework defined the interaction touchpoints for autonomous vehicle services
From the combined observational and interview data, I created a behavioural framework mapping the specific moments, interactions, and touchpoints common across services. I produced detailed videos illustrating examples of each touchpoint. This framework informed the interaction design between passengers and vehicles for robo-taxi and robo-shuttle services under the Seamless Autonomous Mobility project.
(All work is under non-disclosure agreements)