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Monday June 29, 2009
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The 55-mile route from my house to the Lakewood, NJ, baseball stadium came up as 125 miles on the car navigation display. Why? I made a mistake programming the route. Can you see above what the mistake was? Me, neither, for the longest time. Now, look at the Toll Roads button in the lower left corner. If you look carefully, you'll see the icon is a slightly different shade of gray than the others.
That means I hadn't selected the option "allow toll roads." So it tried to route me North, West, South, and then East to avoid the Garden State Parkway toll road to reach my destination that was to the Southeast. Maybe responsibility for this gaffe should be shared: me for not initially seeing the nuance of shading, the interface designers for not thinking clearly. Fortunately, I did catch the error before leaving the driveway, but it took five minutes of head-scratching.
 It's hard to believe, but glitches like this run rampant in car-to-driver interface design. You can throw a half-dozen human factors and MMI (man-machine interface) Ph.D's at the problem, but it's all for naught if they don't have a lick of common sense among them. Or they do and they're overruled by a VP for design who wants it all to look pretty. All too often, a button press on a touchscreen, or a click with a controller knob, is recorded as a different shade of gray, or an inverted color selection, such as white on blue rather than blue on white, and you're supposed to know which is on and which is off.
There is one obvious solution, and that's to use a universal indicator: a hollow box and a checkmark. (A hollow box with an X is sometimes used, except it's not clear if X means selected, as on a ballot, or not selected, as in X'd out.) The screen to the left is how it should be done. To give credit where due, the messed up navigation screen is on the 40-mpg Volkswagen Jetta diesel. In comparison, the well-thought on audio menu is on the ... Volkswagen Jetta diesel. Go figure.
If you've seen similarly messed up car displays, use the feedback box and tell us your horror stories.
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June 29, 2009 12:26 PM
I used to work for a company that built consumer products and this happens more often than not, and its usually some executive trying to put their mark on the product design.
Things like stylists being overruled because some VP thinks flames are cool still (were they ever?) or a 6'4" 300 pound exec complaining that a product is too small and cramped when the target audience is a 5'2" 110 pound female.
These are the people who get paid the big money and they don't get it.
June 30, 2009 2:18 AM
The gnome-netstatus-applet in Ubuntu Linux yanks my chain. It uses icons that look like a couple of tiny CRT terminals to indicate when the computer is receiving and transmitting data over the network. In recent versions of Ubuntu the screens change color between "blue" and "bluer", and there is no way to tell which screen represents "receive" and which represents "transmit". The underlying application works fine, but the user interface is a deal-killer for most users. It's another example of aesthetics taking precedence over usability.
June 30, 2009 12:20 PM
Nice stadium though, isn't it? I mean, after you got there, it was worth the tolls.
The TomTom asks each time if I want to use toll roads.