Chat or Tap? – Comparing Chatbots with ‘Classic’ Graphical User Interfaces for Mobile Interaction with Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand Systems

In autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems, passengers will solely interact with autonomous vehicles via digital user interfaces (UIs). Hence, UIs are crucial for acceptance and user experience (UX). As a foundation for deriving empirically grounded design guidelines, we investigate two approaches for mobile interaction: chatbots and ‘classic’ graphical UIs (GUIs). We evaluated prototypes of both in expert studies (nGUI = 6; nChatbot = 5) and a between-subjects simulator user study (n = 34). The latter enabled participants to experience a complete AMoD journey. While both concepts receive good acceptance and positive UX evaluations, the GUI results in significantly higher attractiveness and user satisfaction ratings. A significant interaction effect reveals a higher intention to use the chatbot in scenarios with a change of plans, but the GUI in ‘happy path’ scenarios. Interview data and emotion curves support this effect. Balancing the concepts‘ advantages and disadvantages, we provide design recommendations and propose to use GUI-based mobile applications with integrated (text-based) conversational elements for future human-AMoD interaction.