In order to be innovative and competitive, the automotive industry seeks to understand how to attract new customers, even before they have experienced the product. User Experience (UX) research often provides insights into situated uses of products, and reflections after their use, however tells us little about how products and services are experienced before use. We propose anticipation theory as a way to understand how shared experiences between people in an online discussion forum relate to UX of cars before they are actually experienced in real-life. We took an ethnographic approach to analyse the activities of members of a self-organised web-based discussion forum for Tesla car enthusiasts, to understand how product anticipation emerges in a digital-material setting. Our study identifies how anticipatory experiences create UX of car ownership which evolves through members’ engagement in a self-organised online community enabled through the digitalisation and connectivity of the car, and how such car experiences generate new forms of digital anticipation of the car. We conclude that the shift towards digitalisation of cars and subscription services creates a need for more interdisciplinary research into spatial and temporal aspects, where socially shared anticipatory experiences are increasingly important for the overall UX. © Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems,.

In this paper, we discuss how people’s user experience (UX) of autonomous driving (AD) cars can be understood as a shifting anticipatory experience, as people experience degrees of AD through evolving advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) in their everyday context.We draw on our ethnographic studies of five families, who had access to AD research cars with evolving ADAS features in their everyday lives for a duration of 1ó years. Our analysis shows that people gradually adopt AD cars, through a process that involves anticipating if they can trust them, what the ADAS features will do and what the longer-term technological possibilities will be. It also showed that this anticipatory UX occurs within specific socio-technical and environmental circumstances, which could not be captured easily in experimental settings. The implication is that studying anticipation offers us new insights into how people adopt AD in their everyday commute driving. © 2020, The Author(s).

A growing body of Human-Computer-Interaction research and the automotive industry has identified that un- derstanding user needs and creating positive user experience (UX) is crucial in order to successfully introduce Autonomous Driving (AD) vehicles to the market. AD research is commonly undertaken to provide user insights by studying the individual-technology experiences in lab settings or by forecasting attitudes and acceptability through large surveys. However, these approaches base their knowledge on people’s past or present expectations and limited real life experiences of AD. To better understand upcoming individual user needs and to enable new innovations beyond acceptability forecasts and UX lab tests, we need to identify new concepts through alter- native methodologies that can generate user foresights based on users’ evolving anticipations of AD in their everyday lives. We propose an ethnographic approach with iterative speculative scenarios, which we demon- strate through a study undertaken with participants from five families who were introduced to evolving levels of AD, in real-life situations. To demonstrate the methodology, we draw on empirical findings which reveal anticipatory experiences, which we abstract through the concepts of confidence, hope and being-in-the-moment. We show how these concepts structured our user foresights, and outline the implications of engaging them in innovation processes.

As machines become increasingly intelligent, the HCI community is presented with new challenges regarding methods to capture and understand user experience (UX). In the case of autonomous driving (AD), this involves new scenarios where humans and intelligent vehicles need to act together in real-life traffic situations with other road users. This article responds to this context by 1) outlining a longitudinal design ethnography method whereby participants drove semiautonomous cars in their everyday environments to capture such human-machine relations in real-life settings, 2) demonstrating the complexities of the relations between humans and AD vehicles, 3) engaging theories of socio-materiality and entanglement to understand the human-machine relations of AD cars, and 4) identifying anticipatory experiences that emerge from these relations and their implications for informing UX design. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

The transition towards electric vehicles (EV)s is rapidly increasing, and the automotive industry has been busy exchanging to electric engines. However, electrification of cars is not only about hardware, but it also implies a digitalisation of cars. Charging and maintenance of EVs is enabled through digital platforms. Little is known of how this digitalisation of cars affect people’s everyday lives. What happens when the car moves from being simply a machine that provides means for transport, but also becomes a power source and a sensor platform with computing capacity powered with AI driven technologies that is controlled via digital platforms? In this article, we present findings on how people experience and learn to live with EVs in their everyday life. We argue that ethnographic understandings of EVs as evolving digi-physical phenomena provide opportunities to foresight how to implement EVs from a people-centric perspective.