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When I went car shopping recently, I was amazed by the autonomous technologies in most new models: automatic lane-keeping, braking to avoid collisions and parallel parking, for example.
But I was appalled by the state of dashboard technology. Technology sells, so car companies are all about touch screens and apps these days. Unfortunately, they're truly terrible at designing user interfaces (UIs)—the ways that you, the human, are supposed to interact with it, the car. A good user interface (a) is easy to navigate, (b) puts frequently used controls front and center, (c) gives clear feedback as you make a change and (d) is apparently beyond the capabilities of today's car companies. I asked my Twitter followers to help me nominate the World's Worst Car UI Designs—and I was flooded with responses.
Source:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/automobile-dashboard-technology-is-simply-awful/
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday April 12 2018, @01:33PM
I mentioned this on SN before.
Last June (2017) we rented a nice, powerful car to drive to Colorado and be able to climb the mountains. The car had plenty of power and was great for driving in the mountains.
I was astonished how bad the in car navigation and infotainment system was. A weird mixture of controls. On screen controls were useless while driving. But to make things much more worser, the feel by touch buttons were useless! Of course, whichever adult was not driving at the moment could (attempt to) operate the system.
Along the edges of the screen were four buttons on the left and four on the right. Problem: Those buttons functions, at this moment, were defined by what is on the screen. So being able to feel for the button is useless unless you have very detailed knowledge of the system.
So RTFM! We tried that. The manual was virtually useless. Despite having plenty of time on the long road, and both adults being very tech savvy.
Overall I was astounded at how bad this system was. The design decisions. There seemed to be no clear reason why some controls were physical and others on screen.
The maps and navigation were impressive. It definitely knew the speed limit for everywhere we went. But when we needed directions, we resorted to Google maps on our phones.
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