Anablog

Drew Winter over at Ward’s Auto World has a great editorial about a new “breakthrough”. That breakthrough is the realization that people don’t care about all kinds of whizzy features as much as they do about user friendliness. He attended the same SAE Convergence conference that I did in October 2008, and saw all the presentations about human interface design. This was where I told you about Honda’s work showing that people loved heads up displays. Drew gives the classic example of the BMW iDrive, the geek-fest monstrosity that had 700 menu picks and took 7 of them just to change a radio station. Consumer Reports says it takes 9 steps to change the clock. Drew notes the BMW has gotten with the program and added a few buttons to the base of the joystick. In other words, they got a little analog, and realized there is a sense of importance to control interfaces. That is why the steering wheel is a big round thing right in your face and the Bass Boost is a tiny insignificant button on the console. Artsy types and Japanese consumer electronics designers have this Church-lady tidiness that makes them have all the buttons be the same size and all in tidy little rows. Total moron geeks then replace all the buttons with one big one, but rather than use Morse Code or some standard, they have to dream up some new goofy single-point-interface tapping code, or perhaps I should call it a puzzle.

The new BMW iDrive for 2009, note the dedicated buttons and descriptive labels.

The old BMW iDrive, designed by the same idiots that put one knob on HP oscilloscopes back in the 1980s.

Note how the new design actually used real English words printed in bold san-serif letters to convey information. That is another pet peeve of mine, the love of icons. This is not all the automakers fault. When I was a design engineer at Ford Motor back in the 1980s, Ford begged the government to let them put plain English labels under the heater control icons. Ford argued that words are icons too, and that words are far more understandable than some graphical icon. Our dear beloved government would not let Ford use words for the controls, because the Untied States Government has so much contempt for you they think you will be confused if there is a word and an icon in the same button. Just go to your cube, sit at your desk and eat the food pellet that falls when you have typed enough. Our finance industry needs the loot.