Identifying meaningful user experiences with autonomous products: a case study in fundamental user needs in fully autonomous vehicles

Autonomous products (e.g., home cleaning robots, smart fridges, or autonomous vehicles) take over tasks that require time and effort from their users, redefining both the user roles and context around a product. Consequently, meaningful user experiences should be designed to overcome the risk of relegating humans to undesirable tasks and to take the opportunity of employing users’ newly available time, in contexts such as highly automated vehicles. Meaningful experiences are provided when fundamental user needs (i.e., universal needs that directly contribute to our wellbeing) are fulfilled. Nevertheless, designers face challenges in anticipating and fulfilling user needs related to autonomous products, since autonomous technology continues evolving towards products that are not yet in existence. In this paper, we employ a co-creation workshop method to explore how the typology of thirteen fundamental needs can serve as a starting point to design meaningful user experiences associated with autonomous vehicles. Specifically, our goal is to understand how the typology of thirteen fundamental needs (e.g., autonomy, beauty, comfort...) could help in (1) identifying how deep user needs manifest themselves in a given context and (2) conceptualizing meaningful experiences with autonomous devices. In this aim, we elaborate on the challenge of designing meaningful non-driving- related experiences in fully autonomous vehicles, which could emerge in the future if driving tasks become obsolete. The results propose new clusters of activities and a scenario for each fundamental need, and ultimately show that engaging with the fundamental needs could be a valuable foundation for designing rich human interactions with future technologies.