The Bicycle Barometer: Design and Evaluation of a Cyclist-Specific Interaction for a Public Display

As cycling is increasingly promoted as an environment-friendly, cheap and even fast alternative, there exists an increasing need to civically involve the potentially engaged and opinionated user group of cyclists. Therefore, we designed and evaluated Bicycle Barometer, an interactive bicycle count display that gathers the opinions from cyclists and conveys real-time, multi-dimensional data to them regarding cycling behavior. Our user-centered design process focused on optimizing the user experience by comparing several alternative cyclist-specific interaction designs, which resulted in the combination of a pressure sensitive floor mat, push button and low-resolution LED display. An in-the-wild evaluation study resulted in a set of design recommendations for cyclist-specific interaction, providing concrete insights into how a specifically targeted interaction method for public display is able to afford engagement and enthusiasm from a particular target audience.status: publishe