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In 2012, Tesla released the Model S
with a 17-inch center-mounted touchscreen.
The industry-wide race began to maximize touchscreen size.
This ‘screenification’ inevitably consolidates nearly every vehicle function into a single touchscreen interface. This reduces manufacturing costs and signals technological complexity.
But, the central problem is misalignment between what these interfaces offer and what drivers can safely manage while operating a vehicle.
This misalignment is not simply a matter of consumer preference; it is a measurable safety crisis.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), distracted driving has caused:
3,275
fatalities in 2023
3,208
fatalities in 2024
315,000
injuries in 2024
Research identifies three distinct categories of distracted driving—visual, manual, and cognitive—and modern in-vehicle information system (IVIS) interactions impose all three simultaneously. Critically, task interaction time is the strongest predictor of crash risk among these factors, as it represents the total exposure window during which an unexpected road event may occur.
The NHTSA has established an implicit upper safety threshold of 24 seconds for total task interaction time. Navigation entry tasks on modern IVIS have been found to require an average of approximately 40 seconds to complete, far exceeding this threshold and prompting researchers to conclude that such activities are “too distracting to be enabled while the vehicle is in motion”.
Prolonged interaction does not merely increase exposure time; it induces a “cascading negative effect” on situation awareness, meaning that as a driver’s attention is drawn to the touchscreen, their ability to detect and respond to road hazards degrades cumulatively.
The Case for Vibrotactile Feedback
A critical aspect of the expansion of touchscreens is the elimination of tactile feedback from vehicle controls.
Tactile controls
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Buttons
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Dials
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Knobs
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Toggles
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Stalks
Vibrotactile feedback
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Phone notifications
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Wearable fitness device alerts
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Steering wheel alerts
Drivers can locate and operate controls through touch alone, without diverting excessive visual attention from the road. However, the consolidation of vehicle controls into flat touchscreens eliminate this pathway entirely, forcing drivers to rely on excessive visual attention for every interaction.
Without reliable tactile input, cognitive load increases because the visual system must compensate for the absent proprioceptive information. This is not an insignificant design detail; it represents the removal of a sensory modality that human motor control fundamentally depends upon.
Vibrotactile feedback has emerged as a promising intervention to restore
this lost sensory pathway. It restores a critical non-visual confirmation
channel by delivering input registration directly to the fingertip.
​
By delivering non-visual confirmation of input registration at the fingertip, vibrotactile feedback creates the possibility of reducing the visual verification behaviors (repeated glances at the screen) that represent the most dangerous component of IVIS interaction.
Vibrotactile feedback: haptic vibrations delivered through an actuator in or attached to the touchscreen surface.
Despite previous studies, a significant gap remains:
Multi-step touchscreen interactions for essential driving functions.
This gap is particularly consequential because modern IVIS increasingly requires drivers to navigate multiple menus to complete what were once single-step tasks: switching to high beams, adjusting mirrors, or changing the climate. None of these tasks can be safely deferred while driving. Each additional step in an interaction sequence increases visual-manual demand and extends the total exposure window, compounding the safety risk.
Understanding whether vibrotactile feedback can meaningfully reduce the attentional cost of these multi-step interactions represents a critical and underexplored question at the intersection of IVIS design and driver safety.
This study will address the following research questions:
1
How does multi-step touchscreen interaction affect drivers’ visual-manual workload during essential driving tasks?
2
Does the presence of vibrotactile feedback in touchscreen interactions reduce visual-manual workload compared to touchscreen interactions without vibrotactile feedback?
3
How do users’ preferences and perceived usability differ between touchscreen interfaces with vibrotactile feedback and those without vibrotactile feedback for essential driving functions?
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