The guidelines were developed to aid in-vehicle information system designers to develop the user interface while considering its potential for driver distraction. Not only are these guidelines intended for new technologies in cars and light trucks, there is also a chapter dedicated to the specific needs of commercial truck drivers and to the kinds of information present in their cabs. The challenge, however, was to produce a design guidelines document that would not sit on the designer's shelf and collect dust. This article describes how the guidelines are customer-driven and, therefore, are useful for designers. Examples of issues faced by in-vehicle system designers are presented along with the solutions provided by the guidelines to demonstrate their effectiveness and relevance.
Research can be difficult to translate into guidelines.
In fact, it has been shown that guidelines and handbooks that follow more traditional formats do not maintain the interest of designers and engineers. There is a history of producing guidelines that fail to consider both what is useful information for designers as opposed to researchers and how to present the guidelines in a more user-friendly format. This effort set out to develop design guidelines that successfully generalize existing research data into design parameters that meet the needs of designers. The analytical phase consisted of a literature review, the identification of ATIS and CVO system objectives and performance requirements, a description of ATIS and CVO functions, a comparable systems analysis, a task analysis, a user characteristics and information requirements analysis, and the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of alternative display formats. The empirical stage of this project included 11 laboratory experiments and three field studies.