User Experience of Autonomous Ferries: What Passengers Need and How to Design for It
Felix-Marcel Petermann, Ole Andreas Alsos, Mina Saghafian, Erik Veitch, Grace Winifred Turner, Maria Letizia Potenza · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26) · doi:10.1145/3772318.3791748
Summary
Petermann and colleagues report one of the first in-depth qualitative studies of passenger experience on an autonomous urban ferry, drawing on 164 post-ride semi-structured interviews conducted during a three-week public trial of milliAmpere 2 in Trondheim, Norway, in autumn 2022. The vessel is a battery-electric, 8.65-metre monohull that carries up to 12 passengers across a 110-metre urban canal on demand, with an onboard safety operator present but deliberately not interacting with passengers in order to approximate a fully autonomous experience. The research question — what factors influence passengers' UX of autonomous ferries? — is addressed via a collaborative reflexive thematic analysis in which three researchers coded independently along distinct analytical foci (societal impact; UX and acceptance; perceived safety) and then merged their codes. The paper positions itself as an extension of land-based autonomous vehicle UX research, arguing that waterborne contexts introduce distinctive interpretive and embodied challenges absent from driverless buses and shuttles. Its contribution is a set of six actionable design guidelines covering embodied experience, transparency of autonomous behaviour, temporal predictability, vessel-quay accessibility, the redistribution of social-informational roles previously held by the crew, and the framing of onboard information in familiar, context-appropriate units.
Key findings
Five themes shape passenger UX of autonomous ferries. First, embodied sensory experience: passengers described the ride as unusually calm and quiet thanks to electric propulsion, but unannounced pauses or drifts — caused by traffic avoidance or current compensation — were read as malfunctions rather than normal behaviour because no captain explained them. Second, borrowed expectations: passengers judged the ferry against buses, trains, and conventional ferries, treating hydrodynamic corrections and docking delays as inefficiency rather than purposeful manoeuvres. Third, the vessel-quay interface is the critical accessibility barrier: variable tide, slippery surfaces, sloping ramps and stepped boarding were repeatedly flagged as excluding wheelchair users, people with mobility aids, strollers, and passengers with visual impairments — even though the ferry interior itself was considered easy to navigate. Fourth, on-demand timing was valued by some but seen as incompatible with commuting by others who wanted predictable schedules, with docking taking roughly three minutes introducing hidden waits. Fifth, the absence of a visible operator removed implicit social cues for boarding, disembarkation, and reassurance, so passengers wanted explicit "safe to board"/"safe to exit" indicators, voice announcements explaining non-routine behaviour, and signals that a remote operator was monitoring the journey. Six design guidelines translate these findings into do/don't recommendations for autonomous ferry services.
Relevance
For accessibility practitioners, this paper is a useful reminder that autonomous public-transport accessibility cannot be reduced to vehicle interior design. The authors make the case — grounded in 164 real-world interviews — that the travel chain (quay, ramp, boarding gate, weather conditions, wayfinding cues) is where most exclusion happens, and that removing a human operator silently strips out implicit accommodations that disabled passengers previously relied on (deckhand gestures, verbal "safe to step off" cues, personal security reassurance). The guidelines align with universal-design thinking and translate directly to land-based autonomous shuttles, rail, and robotaxi contexts. Limitations include the short trial period, a single vessel on a short urban route, non-comparative design, and a sample skewed toward novelty-driven riders; disabled passengers are discussed in aggregate rather than recruited as a specific cohort, which leaves targeted access audits for future work.
Tags: autonomous vehicles · autonomous ferry · public transport accessibility · human-machine interface · automation transparency · universal design · travel chain · embodied experience · user experience
Standards referenced: COLREGS