Affordance-Based Interaction Design for Intelligent Cockpit Touchscreens: Effects on Safety Perception and User Experience

As intelligent cockpit systems increasingly rely on touchscreen interaction, concerns have emerged regarding driver distraction and interaction safety. Existing studies have primarily examined physical interface design, cognitive processing, multimodal interaction, or adaptive systems separately, while a unified framework explaining their combined influence on safety perception and user experience remains limited. Drawing on affordance theory, this study proposes a multidimensional interaction design framework consisting of physical affordance, cognitive affordance, interactive affordance, and dynamic affordance. A structural equation modeling approach was employed using survey data collected from 390 drivers. The results indicate that interactive affordance shows the largest model-estimated path coefficient for safety perception (β = 0.312, p < 0.001) and the largest direct coefficient for user experience (β = 0.246, p < 0.001), closely followed by cognitive affordance (β = 0.212, p < 0.001); because the affordance dimensions are empirically strongly overlapping (HTMT > 0.95), these dimension-level comparisons are descriptive rather than definitive. Safety perception significantly mediates the relationships between affordance dimensions and user experience. In addition, dynamic affordance positively moderates the relationship between physical affordance and safety perception (β = 0.161, p < 0.001), suggesting that context-adaptive interaction can strengthen the safety benefits of physical interface design. This study extends the application of affordance theory to intelligent cockpit touchscreen interaction and highlights the importance of integrating multimodal feedback, cognitive simplicity, and context-adaptive interaction into intelligent cockpit design. The findings provide practical implications for improving perceived safety and user experience in intelligent vehicles.