Towards Self-Explainability of Autonomous Ferries: Advancing Developers' Understanding of Passengers' Needs Through a Service Safari

We describe employing the service safari method to help developers of an autonomous passenger ferry better understand passengers' needs and requirements, including about what information a ferry should offer to passengers at which points in time, and how, also about the ferry's own behaviour (self-explainability). The developers took rides on current, non-autonomous ferries and then participated in a one-day workshop on passengers' needs, creating empathy maps, personas, and user journeys. Results will be verified by subsequent workshops with 'real' ferry passengers. Our contribution shows, firstly, that the service safari method can be productively employed also within the context of autonomous ferries design. Secondly, passengers' information needs that were derived markedly differ from information needs that nautical personnel have. Such differences will likely not only necessitate user group-specific interface and interaction designs, but will likely also influence design decisions on the ferry's autonomous components, such as of situation models.