WoZ Way

Interaction designers often have difficulty understanding people's real-world experiences with ubiquitous systems. The automobile is a great example of these challenges, where on-road testing is time-consuming and provides little ability for rapid prototyping of interface behavior. We introduce WoZ Way, a system to connect designers to remote drivers. We use live video, audio, car data, and Wizard of Oz speech and interfaces to enable remote observation and interaction prototyping on the road. Our implementation integrates environmental, system level, and social information to make the invisible visible. We tested across three example deployments highlighting usage in interaction prototyping and observational studies. Our findings illustrate how designers explored the situated experiences of people on the road, and how they experimented with different improvisational Wizard of Oz interactions. WoZ Way is both a design research and a design prototyping tool, which can support the work of interaction designers through naturalistic observations, contextual inquiry, and responsive interaction prototyping.