Auto Fail

Lately I’ve been pondering, “Why is it that most people design the user interface last?”

It would seem, to me at least, if one were to design a product for the mass market, one would focus a lot of time and energy on how that product would be seen by that market.  What will it look like, how will it function in peoples’ hands, how will people interact with it.

Seems logical, if you want people to like your product they need to enjoy using it.  Spend a lot of time making that product enjoyable to use and people will love you.  If on the other hand, you make using your product painful, awkward, and hard people will tend to shy away from using your wares, and you can bet they will tell their friends about their horrible experience.

I was inspired for this posting on a recent trip to San Diego where we rented a nice economy car for the trip.  I snapped a few pictures of the car’s “user interface,” or inside, to share with you some of the pain I experienced on our trip.

I give you, auto fail.

Figure 1, the steering wheel from our rental car.

Steering Wheel

Figure 1. Steering Wheel on Our Rental Car

Seems to hold the function of most steering wheels, its round, it was fairly comfortable, as so much it wasn’t wrapped in barbed wire, and when I turned the steering wheel the car also turned…so far so good.

Let’s take a closer look at the two controls they deemed necessary to include on the left hand side of the steering wheel.

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Figure 2. Up-close and Personal With the Steering Wheel

Two buttons are included in Figure 2, they must be important, right?  I mean someone took the time to make a mold of the steering wheel and cut out those two buttons, then run wire all the way up the steering column to connect to these two very important buttons.

These two buttons control:

In most every car I have ever driven these buttons are replaced by a stalk that comes out of the dashboard, or they are on the end of the turn signal.  They are never given prominence of being placed on the steering wheel where so many more important buttons could go, like radio controls, cruise control, anything that could actually help me while I was driving!

And what type of great information did these two buttons deliver?

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Figure 3. Information Display on the Dash

You get the coolant temperature…

What am I going to do with the coolant temperature?  Is it going to change the way I am driving?  Should I shut off the AC?  Should I change a tire?  I have no idea what this piece of information on my dash serves me as I drive.

So far I have two buttons on this car that take up some prominent car real-estate, strike one.  On top of that these buttons show me information I can’t even do anything with, strike two.

Strike three comes in the form of the emergency brake.

Emergency Brake Usable

Figure 4.  The Emergency Brake

At first blush the emergency brake looks perfectly functional.  Figure 4 was taken with the armrest up.  Figure 5 is how the emergency brake is normally in the car.

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Figure 5.  Normal View of the Emergency Brake.

The emergency brake is completely covered by the armrest.  Every time I park I need to lift the arm rest to use the emergency brake.  Every time I want to start driving again I have to lower the arm rest to make it functional.  A fairly simple task, parking and then driving, complicated by constantly having to raise and then lower the arm rest to get to the piece of equipment I want to use.

If I owned this car it would drive me insane, (no pun intended), every time I went to use the car.

Needless to say I had a horrible experience driving this car and I’ve now told all my friends about it.