As HMI Development was introduced in Advanced Engineering, we quickly discovered that we needed other, additional input than our colleagues whose field of work required mostly feedback from customers (which doesn’t mean drivers/users most of the time at truck business) & new technological developments of suppliers & researchers. HMI needs the unfiltered feedback of its users (filtering later & asking the right questions is what HMI developers are there for). Concerning Truck Drivers, that can be a bit problematic, as many of them can’t simply be called to visit us to perform user studies. That is especially true if developing features for the sub-group of Truck Drivers who are most unlikely to be available, especially concerning long haul. So we started with a well known user exploration technique to designers using guerilla interviews. We performed these interviews at Truck-stops were Truckers have to do there mandatory breaks and are mostly bored anyway. That proved to be very effective but another obstacle emerged. It was demanding & error prone to explain the context of a function or display content to the driver. We needed a tool that enables use to show that context right there as realistic as possible to get the most realistic feedback. That was the starting point of the mobile Truck HMI VR Lab.

• Adaption of a qualitative user research technique for Truck HMI Development
• How immersion & context helps to rise the quality of user evaluation results 
• How we adapted the concept during covid
• The leap to enable quantitative HMI Studies with this setup
• Strategies to rise immersion & drop costs