Abstract
Designing autonomous public transport requires understandinghow passengers experience such systems in real-world use. Forautonomous ferries, however, little is known about how users inter-pret waterborne autonomy. We address this gap through post-rideinterviews (N=164) from a public trial of an autonomous ferry heldin Trondheim, Norway, in 2022. Our thematic analysis identifies several ferry-specific factors that shape the user experience (UX).The themes were formed around sensitivity to motion and docking,the readability of manoeuvres without a visible operator, expecta-tions around on-demand timing, and accessibility challenges at thevessel-quay interface. From these findings, we propose six designguidelines that address embodied experience, transparency of au-tonomous behaviour, temporal predictability, accessibility acrosstravel chains, and the redistribution of social informational rolestraditionally held by the crew. These findings extend land-based au-tonomous vehicle research by revealing how waterborne contextsshape trust and acceptance. The contribution of this work is a set ofactionable design guidelines to achieve a predictable, trustworthy,accessible, and reliable autonomous ferry service.