Slashdot Mirror
Computers and Cars: A Maddening Experience?
Johnny writes "The nytimes has a review of the new BMW 745i iDrive system. The iDrive system combines some 270 functions, some accessable by voice, into one tactile feedback joystick mouse thingy. While maybe easier for computer junkies, the reviewer finds the interface 'maddening, especially at first' and wonders out loud what a car from Microsoft might be like, citing that the 745i offers a clue. Without a key, a floor shifter or really any buttons, this might be the future for cars, are the masses ready to wrestle with computers just to go to Wawa for milk?"
Now I'm not saying cars aren't easy to use. However, one cant compare it to computers that easily. (the iDrive can be compared though). The main reason that the interface to cars has not changed in almost a 100 years is simple. Backwards compatibility, and consumer familiarity. Thats right.. It has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is. After all, a consumer cant be expected to take multiple driving tests in order to get a license for each make of car. They had to standardize it so that a person who has driven one car can drive just about ANY car. They cant have licenses that say "Okay for Toyota, Chrysler, and Dodge only".
Its interesting how familiarity with the interface also happens to be one of the BIGGEST problems that linux faces when trying to enter the desktop market. People who have taken the effort to learn or attend courses on using computers learnt the Microsoft interface to software. When they come across a unix one, they aren't familiar with it, and cant use it as well.. regardless of whether its better or not.
The iDrive is like linux. Sure its harder to use in the beginning, but once you get the hang of it, you'll wonder how you managed to get by without it.
Just my 2 cents worth.
- Tempestdata
the light is stuck in the middle of a confusing, crowded console.
:) need as little distraction as possible.
This says it all. Have we learned nothing from the aviation industry? Studies showed that too much computerisation and increasingly complex HUDS were shown be be if anything, counter-productive for pilots - both in civil and military aviation. When a pilot is flying, he (or she - hello linux-loving Jane who flies Airbuses
This also applies to fly by wire. When you fly a manually controlled aircraft like a Tiger Moth, a hang glider or a Cessna, you can feel at all times what the aircraft is doing. As soon as that gets replaced with a computerised system, you're removing the pilot's senses from the equation - a Bad Thing.
I expect car manufacturers to go through the same learning process - and wind up diverting processing power and features into simpler displays. Why they haven't researched it properly is beyond me - after all it's a human controlling a complex machine which takes time to learn etc. - not much different from flying.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
I think this is funny. Slashbot tries to slur Microsoft because of the BMW iDrive, yet doesn't even realize that the iDrive uses Windows CE.
http://www.microsoft.com/insider/bmw7series.htm
The system was actually built by Siemens along with all the custom software and such.
Christ slashbot is so out of touch with the computing world it's not even funny, this thing has been in the news for the past year.
BTW, the UIs for autos were not standardized in their current form very early on. I got the explanation how to drive a 1920 Ford truck a couple of weeks ago. These were very strange to the modern driver. I'm not sure if anything besides the steering wheel was in the same place as it is on typical cars of today. I think there was a brake pedal, but it was rightmost. Other pedals did different things to the gears, but there were assorted levers involved in gear-shifting, too. So, it takes time for these things to get worked out. Nowadays, that means thousands of lawsuits while things get worked out.
Cars have changed many times. I have driven cars from the 30's and it isn't that much more complicated if you already know how to drive a car with a standard with partial or no synchro on the manual transmission and with manual choke. If you can't do that, what the heck are they doing letting you drive an 1800 kg hopefully-guided missile?
Turning cars into things idiots can drive has very much turned the roadways into the home of the idiot. ABS, automatic transmissions, cruise control (this one not so much), traction control, etc. are the kind of things that have lowered the bar of driver competence. And they give illusions of capability that aren't always accurate. ABS works better under some conditions than standard brakes, but not always. In slush or gravel, it actually has longer braking distance (as O.P.P. studies discovered). For some reason, vehicles got from A to B for years without a lot of these features and yet we have them now. Computer control is another example.
Take your example of the dimmer switch. Remove the floor switch (not too hard to replace) and put it (linked to the windshield wipers/etc) on the control yoke (not as easy to replace) and this is an improvement? And what happened to automatic headlight dimmers like those used by Cadillac? The auto-industry has had any number of good ideas that for mysterious reasons have vanished, and a lot of hairbrained ones that stuck around.
Once upon a time, car manuals listed technical specs like compression, gear ratios, horsepower and torque curves (not just single rpm quotations), bore and stroke, etc. Now, you get told about the cup holders. Need I say more?
And I found it interesting that a some of the head safety guys for NASCAR and CART utterly disagree with some of the current design practices for cars. They _know_ about high speed collisions with other cars and with concrete walls, and they have a rather different philosophy on how to protect the passangers than most car manufacturers.
Car manufacturers are in business to make money, not necessarily to make the best car and sometimes that means gizmos, even if they are a bad idea. If it were otherwise, someone can explain to me why a ten year old F150 supercab with a 2.5 ton truck 4 speed and a carbuerated 351 gets better MPG than a standard cab F150 with a 5 speed with overdrive and fuel injection and a 302? New ain't always better.
So how long before someone slaps Embedded Linux + Apache on, hooks it to a cellphone, and lets the world log in?
If that happened, what would a Slashdotting do to the car?
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Okay, so you wrote a long skreed about how "intuitive" is a fundamentally meaningless term. Unfortunately, I think that's because you're confused about what "intuitive" means, as applied to technology and whatnot.
When I was studying mathematics years ago, one of my profs gave me the best definition of the term "intuition" that I've ever come across.
For a young mathematician, there are a few words that seem puzzling and out of place in the mathematical vocabulary; "elegant" and "intuitive" are among them. Many times I heard some step in a proof described as "intuitively obvious", when (a) it was *not* obvious to me and (b) the notion of "intuition" didn't seem to fit well into the world of mathematical rigor. I quickly gained an understanding of what was meant by "intuition" in the context of math; mathematicians who've been around for a while gain a "feel" for things and know what's likely to be true without laboriously working it out (and intuition is critically important to research -- doing a depth-first search of the space of possible proofs looking for interesting theorems would be... tedious ;-) ).
When I asked my prof about it, though, he gave me a precise, concise and absolutely correct definition. "Intuition," he said, "is nothing more or less than applied experience." He went on to point out that "experience" is completely different from "knowledge"; in fact they're nearly orthogonal.
So, when trying to decide if something will be intuitive to some person, you just need to consider whether or not they have significant applicable experience, which is to say, how similar it is to what they've used before. It's also a good idea to consider if it might have misleading similarities. Apparently applicable experience which is nevertheless wrong makes the new thing seem "counter intuitive".
This is exactly what you said, I just thought you might find it useful to have a precise yet usable definition of the term.
Unfortunately, this definition points out that one of my favorite quotes is, in fact, wrong. Bruce Edigar said that "The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned". But the nipple isn't an intuitive interface. Babies don't start sucking because they have experience with something fairly similar. The nipple is an *instinctive* interface; people come into the world with that knowledge hard-wired.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The NY Times aren't the only ones scathing of the 7-series.
e =h ttp://drive.fairfax.com.au/content-new/news/genera l/2002/05/10/FFXYKQ1Y01D.html
http://www.drive.com.au/news/article.asp?articl
Almost everyone that used the car had problems with it - most people couldn't even work out how to start it.
Oh, and BTW, MS did design the interface. iDrive is by Microsoft IIRC. I think that somebody should get Apple on interface design for cars - then it would be truly easy to use.
-- james