An interface of an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system was developed to validate such a proposal in a case study of design outcome. Participants of specific digital divide levels joined in participatory or non-participatory processes to investigate whether the design outcomes would mitigate or manifest the digital divide. Participants were first categorized by preliminary questionnaire into five levels of digital divide: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Then they were assigned to design workshops with a balanced composition of participants of high and low digital divide levels. The interfaces generated from the workshops were experimentally validated to analyze how participatory design affected the contributions and design outcomes of the participants. The results indicated that the participation of users with a high digital divide in a participatory design process produced new but impractical prototypes, probably attributable to their limitation of technological proficiency being magnified in the process. In contrast, users with low digital divide generated more sophisticated designs with increased structural complexity in workshops. Future research is required to validate these findings and refine the proposed methods.