Our second research question reads as follows: “What are the main challenges of driving an eCar, and how can we design and develop technology to help our users overcome these challenges?”.
We knew from the onset that the number of eCars in Norway heavily outweigh the number of public charging points, resulting in what we have referred to as a charging point shortage (see section 1.3). However, as a part of our research, we also wanted to research any other challenges eCar drivers face, discuss potential solutions to these with the users, and use this data to develop prototypes for said solutions.
As it turned, out, based on our research, the problem of finding available charging points is the main problem facing today’s eCar drivers. Every single interviewee either reported having experienced problems finding available charging points themselves or being concerned with finding available charging points in the future, given that eCars are only growing in prevalence. Other challenges facing eCar owners are somewhat related to the challenge of finding charging points, namely “range anxiety”, trips requiring careful planning when travelling to new locations, finding compatible charging points, and charging station data in existing apps and other services being outdated (see sections 4.5 and 4.8). In our opinion, these challenges are interconnected and relate to what fundamentally separates eCar drivers from the drivers of fossil fueled automobiles, namely that they are dependent on charging points rather than gas or diesel. While filling up a tank with gas rarely takes more than a minute, charging an eCar to an acceptable battery level may take anywhere from half an hour to a day, depending on which make and model of car you are driving, the distance to the next charging station on your route, and the effect of the charging point itself.
We have viewed these as the most important challenges facing modern eCar drivers that could potentially be resolved through designing and developing an app. In this chapter we will to describe how we have tried to solve the users challenges outlined above in the form of functionalities we have either prototyped or implemented in the app, and how and why we see these as solutions to the challenges.
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6.2.1 Map and Planning
Although a map of charging stations seems to be a staple of eCar apps (see chapter 1.4), we felt from the very beginning that an eCar app without a map would be of relatively little use, given that an overview of the limited number of charging stations seems to be an absolute necessity. Our users seemed to be in agreement, and no one questioned the inclusion of a map, several even stating outright during the second interview round that they disliked the menu affixed to the bottom of the screen as it obscured some of the map (see subsection 4.8.5).
We also decided before speaking to the users that it might be useful for some functionality in the app that would allow the users to plan for trips. Surprisingly, a lot of eCar apps do not seem to include this functionality. In both Ladestasjoner.no and Fortum’s Charge & Drive, as far as we can tell, the only route functionality is to generate a route between your current position to a given charging point through either opening a web browser or a separate map app such as Google Maps (i.e. the functionality is not implemented in the eCar app itself, but requires a secondary resource for generating the route, see figure 34).
Figure 34: Navigation from current position to a charging station in Fortum’s Charge & Drive app via Google Maps.
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In our solution however, the users are able to see the route directly in the app without having to open up a separate application (see figure 35).
Figure 35: Screenshot of navigating from your current position to a charging station in our app.
The results from both the interview rounds, as well as the document analysis, indicated to us that the users need a way to navigate not only from their current position to a charging station, but also to see charging stations along a route in order to make travel plans. Neither Fortum’s Charge & Drive nor Ladestasjoner.no seem to include any such functionality. One of the cited forum posts in subsection 4.5.2 provide an example of one of many users who explicitly used elbilforum.no to ask the other users for webpages or other services with for seeing charging stations along a specified route. The majority of these eCar owners received responses from other forum owners recommending various foreign webpages and services, perhaps the most cited being https://www.goingelectric.de/stromtankstellen/routenplaner/ which is a German website with no options for translation.
Because of this, one of the first functionalities we knew we had to have and implemented both when working with Drupal/DrupalGap and Angular/Firebase was “Directions”.
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Figure 36: Demonstration of “Directions” functionality in finished app.
Figure 36 demonstrates the “Directions” functionality in the app we have developed. While it could stand some fine-tuning, it nevertheless provides the ability to see all charging stations along a specified route (in this case from Egersund to Stavanger) and negates need the for opening a secondary app or browser to generate the routes (although, as described in subsection 5.3.2, it still uses Google Maps’ API) .
6.2.2 Filter
Another complaint the users leveraged against both GPSes and various other apps, websites, and services, was that the filtering function on these were insufficient. Some users have very specific needs when it comes to charging, as noted in sections 1.2 and 4.8.1. This means that users should be able to filter out charging stations from the map based on a number of criteria, rather than just a few. While most of the users agreed that rapid charging, price (i.e. free of charge or not), and public availability were important criteria to be able to filter on, several other factors were cited as important when choosing a charging station (see chapters 4.5.1 and 4.8.8). In our prototype we have therefore tried to be as inclusive as possible for the different data points we have for filtering, including the “most important” at the top of the filtering screen, but including added filters upon scrolling further down on the screen. An ongoing part
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of our investigation has been whether the user should specify some filters upon registering (for instance compatible outlet types) and whether the filtering functionality should be able to remember your past settings or be reset between uses. As discussed in subsection 4.8.7, our users seemed split as to this question, and thus this never made it into the finalized list of requirements presented in section 4.9.
6.2.3 Up to Date Information
GPSes have traditionally been used as a means for planning trips, and indeed a number of the interviewees reported using the built-in GPS in their eCar when taking longer trips, but the downside reported by the majority of these was that the charging station data on their GPSes were seldomly up-to-date. New charging stations are being built all the time, while older, outdated charging stations are being closed, so up-to-date information is absolutely crucial for eCar drivers when planning for trips to avoid them ending up at a location without any remaining battery life in their eCar and without any place at which to charge.
As mentioned in subsection 5.2.2, we have used Nobil’s database to import charging station data and have configured cron to check for updates daily. This means that if a charging station is added to or removed from, or in some other way altered in, Nobil’s database, our app will reflect these changes within 24 hours. However, this solution depends on Nobil’s database in itself being up-to-date, and during the document analysis we found a few forum users complaining that it wasn’t.
Comments and rating have been a widely accepted feature during interviews with our users, and we believe these features can be designed to make up for lacking or unupdated information resulting from Nobil’s database being outdated. But this would then require that we have users who want to utilize the comment features, and that their comments are written in a way such as it is helpful for the other users. So far the comments have been implemented without any rating since we did not find any consensus for how they should be implemented.
We suggested likes, thumbs up and smileys, and one of the users suggested using star rating (see subsection 4.8.10). In addition we are not sure if they should be able to rate on the charging stations queue, and price. But all the users agreed that it would be very useful to know if there are any problems on the charging station.
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