Slashdot Mirror
Driver Study: People Want Fewer Embedded Apps, Just Essentials That Work Easily
Lucas123 writes 'A study released at the Telematics Detroit 2014 conference revealed the obvious: Most people don't want more distracting embedded apps in their cars; they just want essential apps like navigation and music to be intuitive to use and reliable. Part of the study involved a focus group of 46 people who were asked to evaluate infotainment systems from three luxury car makers and four "mass consumer" car makers. The drivers were asked to do three things: Navigate home, find a pizza shop and find a radio station. Only 40% were able to complete all three tasks. Not surprisingly, the highest rated infotainment system was Tesla because its icons were "large" and it was easy to figure out.'
For any in car control - I need to be able to use it without looking at it.
Too many things fail at this.
"The car stereo I wanted 10 years ago"
"The car stereo I want today":
http://i.imgur.com/NGcUN.jpg
more time in the shop....profit!
The less time we spend touching the screen, the better one can keep their eyes on the road and avoid becoming absorbed with the gadget. That means sensitive touch controls with very little lag, quick look-up times, and voice inputs. Google/Bing integration would keep data entry to a minimum too; if I've already have a place marked on the maps, I wouldn't have to enter it into the system all over again.
Of course I have no time to watch movies on my screen or visually sort through ads to get what I need.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
GPS indash included in the stereo, and bluetooth so it interfaces with a cellphone
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Things that i can feel i'm working and not touchscreens!
BUTTONS KNOBS AND TACTILE FEEDBACK!
I'm starting to shop for a car, and I'll be wearing gloves on the test drives. I can live with a capacitive touch screen for navigation, but I'm one of those oddball people who insists on being able to turn on the heat and tune the radio during the winter.
The drivers were asked to do three things: Navigate home, find a pizza shop and find a radio station.
I can do all these things *now* w/o any fancy crap. The radio in my Civic is dead simple to use, and I know where I live and how I got where ever I am now because I drove there. I also know where my local pizza shops are and don't generally go about look for random ones.
I guess Nav systems may be great for traveling and when one is *really* new in town, but other than that, I'm not convinced.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I test drove a Cadillac recently and GM's touch screen looks like it was built by people with zero UI experience. Of course, it's just about as bad as every other modern app. Nobody understands flow anymore. And it's not an American thing either. The same problems plagued touch interfaces on imports as well. Oddly, BMW's is much better than it used to be.
This garbage is so sluggish, too. Adjusting climate controls used to be a matter of turning on a knob. Now, I have to tap on a vague piece of plastic. Nothing happens, so I tap again. Then again. Finally, the fans kick on FULL BLAST... And apparently there are only three speed settings. And seriously, adjusting volume by sliding your finger across a screen? Jesus Christ, whomever thought that shit was a good idea is a fucking MORON... Why have umpteen volume levels if all you can do is wildly skate between 0 and MAXIMUM with barely any control.
I don't care if I sound like the old man on the porch, shaking his fist. These UIs are completely retarded.
I need Microsoft Office embedded app so I can work on business-critical documents.
I sense a certain amount of hostility.
Like the new Lincoln MKZ with TOUCH controls for volume and temperature, on a smooth surface, without any tactile reference. Bravo!
I even hate the push buttons and rotary controls for the heater, it used to be that you could control everything with 2 slides, one for temp and one to choose where to send the air.
It was very easy to know, only by touch, where the slides are. With a rotary button, you have to look at it to see where it is pointing. And the push buttons are also much less convenient, if I have to put the control on front defrost quickly (because the windshield is suddenly fogging) with the old controls I only had to slide it all the way to the right.
Now I have to find the front defrost button wich is the second to the right, flush with all the other buttons.
Even in some car manuals of the 70's and 80's it was stated that if you want to defog or defrost the car in an emergency you just put all the slides to the right or to the top (depending on the orientation of the controls) without thinking, it will automatically put the heater to front defrost,maximum heat, full fan, outside air (no recirculation).
It's the same problem with almost every interface today, from electronics (think about how easy and fast it was to change the volume or choose the input on a 70's Receiver, with it's big buttons compared to receivers of today with it's tiny buttons and display you have to look at)
Don't get me started on volume and mute controls. Why don't laptops get a physical cut off switch as a mute button? When I power up my laptop in a library or at school I have to remember if I put it on mute the last time, and if not I need to wait for the mute button to become responsive but since it's controlled by software and a certain driver, it becomes usable right after Windows decide to play it's login sound. Very annoying. How much would it cost to put a physical switch to cut out the electrical signal to the speakers???
I think we're moving backward with UI, today look ingenuity and trend is more important than usability.
Now get off my lawn!
Try it! Library of Babel
I have a 2006 Prius and just recently we got a 2014 Prius V... And the '06 has a vastly superior navigation system. The '14 comes with crapware-loaded Entune and some of the worst user-interface decisions I've ever seen in a product.
I like that it shows me the traffic, but it'd be nice if they licensed Google Maps for the information so it'd be closer to accurate. And it'd also be nice if roads in cities weren't grey-on-grey with grey text. (Why are you showing me that I'm in a city by changing the background to grey anyway? Is the population of the current governmental entity really critical information when driving?)
It's also somewhat amusing - but also irritating - to see garbage like Bing or MovieTickets.com in the car screen, which work if you connect them to the internet on your smartphone... But if I have my smartphone in the car, wouldn't I check movie times on that, instead of a never-updated slow app whose interface was designed by someone that wears their pants on their head?
Many cartoons over the years have made jokes about people adding completely ridiculous things to their cars in the name of convenience. They usually end up in a hilarious, hubris-fueled accidents. Unfortunately, it's turning out to be a lot more prophetic and a lot less hilarious than anyone wants to admit.
If you're going to do a study on automobile infotainment systems, you need a broader set of data: 46 people with 7 types of systems, 2 of which are very uncommon. This dataset sounds like they just asked around their office and of the 46 people that work there, only 7 employees had any sort of infotainment system, 3 being the bosses.
Want to do this study right? Go rent 10-12 cars with the various systems, park them at Walmart one day and survey, park them at the mall the next day and survey, park them at the fancy downtown shopping district and survey, and then hold a private dinner for the upper-class folks and survey. 4 distinct groups and hundreds or thousands of data points.
Be sure to include systems that actually are used: Toyota Entune, Ford Sync, GM/Chevrolet Intellilink/MyLink, Honda HondaLink, Dodge/Chrysler Uconnect, Nissan NissanConnect, Mazda, Volkswagen, BMW ConnectedDrive, Mercedes Comand, and Cadillac CUE.
Come on, how many people actually have a Porsche with an infotainment, or a Tesla? Seriously, Ford sold twice as many Fiesta's in the US last year than Tesla has sold total.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
It's not just that embeded apps in cars are garbage "new" but I've yet to see an car that has constant support for the newest innovations and devices (USB ports not compatible with new phones) that give the car owner reason to try to use said features when there is a big chance things that they will try to use with it in a year or two will not function due to the car not being updated to support them.
How do you provide updates to car? Auto manufactures are already pretty closed chested with the basic computers that are in most cars post 2000.
I understand cars are heavily regulated but I don't see internet-capable cars happening anytime in the near future as that opens up a bunch safety and security concerns.
If your heat works, why do you need gloves?
Or just get gloves with metal-lined threads on the fingertips.
Is somebody that is buying a new car and does not own a smart phone? I do not want much in the way of smarts. I want a nice sunlight readable touchscreen, buttons on the steering wheel (more are better), and a HUD. The stereo should turn into an amp and radio tuner (maybe a USB storage interface) for the cellphone. The screen buttons etc should slave themselves to that same cellphone. Nice to haves might be a fixed GPS for better reception, OBD access to get vehicle info. All this can happen today via Bluetooth and wifi (for the screen casting). Expand the qi charging spec to have a magnetic mounting. The point being is cars last a decade or more the electronic systems only a few years before being outdated. Sure put in some default radio and environmental controls just in case, it can probably also function as the bridge from Bluetooth to the can bus or whatever the car uses.
No sir I dont like it.
Moreover, people tend to replace their smartphones every two years or so, and when you get a new phone you may have to completely reconfigure your infotainment system in order to use the new apps.
My wife an I have two vehicles with completely different controls (Subaru and Chevy). When we take a long trip we rent a car, different make every time. Don't tell me I need to learn all those different Infotainment systems, that won't happen. We have phones that we know and a Garmin GPS (because Google screwed up Maps Navigation on Android last summer). That's all we need.
Unfortunately, what we want/need is not what we're willing to pay for. When we're sitting at the dealership for 10hrs strait, wondering how society has devolved into such a state that you can't just walk in and buy a car without being force to wait through the most soul crushing nightmare of a sales pitch ever created... and we get presented with $25k Ford that has a basic radio, and a $25k GM that has a touch screen that does... well we don't know, but it's pretty. Our reptillian brain takes over and we go with out caveman "Me want more!"
Cars are built to make you buy them. It's just a side effect they have a use after purchase.
If your heat works, why do you need gloves?
You do realize that a car takes a while to heat up when the air is forty below zero, right? And that you don't want to get frostbite from having to take gloves off to touch a screen to turn the heat on before it heats up?
I'm perfectly happy using my phone. Just make a cradle for the phone (with charger), add a screen to display what's on my phone, and add controls (both voice and tactile) that allow me to control it. That's all.
What do I want in my car? 4 wheels (plus a spare in the boot), pedals and a gear leaver (that are physically connected to the things they control), an engine, seats, windows that open and maybe a radio. Anything else is just something to fail or distract me from what I'm supposed to be doing (driving). I'm not old enough to be a stick in the mud but I like having a car that is relatively simple and easily maintained.
I recently had a Ford Fusion as a rental. It was a hybrid, which I had never driven before, and it took most of a day of trial and error to figure out which combination of this-and-that you need to do to even start the thing. It had the Microsoft In Sync system, which I never figured it out. In fact, I couldn't even figure out how to turn off the radio - could only turn down the volume. On the plus side, it did perform quite well as a car (that driving thing).
Really. If you want to try that test again. I've never used a GPS. I've barely used a touch screen. My current car radio has awesome buttons that you don't have to look at once you know which set is scan vs step. I've beta tested many complex games and a 50k accounting system while it was live.
I'll tell you real quick just how annoying it is to use :) Just don't make me keep it....
Having physical buttons for things means you can do things by feel and not have to take your eyes off the road. I replaced the stereo in my 10 year old Pathfinder with a Kenwood that had a touch screen. I hate it. It's impossible and dangerous to use while driving owing to the location of the radio at the bottom of the stack in the dash.
My Armada and my Altima both still have the factory radios, which are both knob-and-button. No touchscreens for me, ever again.
And I haven't figured out the magic incantation to associate one of the "bookmark" buttons with a radio station.
I keep hearing that iDrive has gotten better. I can't imagine how bad it must have been before.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I have a new car... 2014 Chevy Volt and I've found the thing pretty darn intuitive. I can do all of those functions from the steering wheel. The only exception would be if I'm at some FM radio station and I want to tune to some other FM radio station I have to use the tune scroll wheel... but I had to do the same thing on my 14 year old car I just sold.
Setting favorites is as easy as merely pressing and holding the spot on the favorites for 3 seconds... then it's set.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
very short glances at a control panel in realtively safe moments isn't an extraordinary risk.
And collision avoidance systems in modern cars (standard for some amnufacturer, about to be mandatory in a couple of years in EU) are definitely a help to make the "short glances away of the road".
Of course, such systems ARE NOT an excuse to do a lousy jobs and construct very distracting and attention grabbing interfaces.
BUT it's always reassuring to know that electronics can help making your travel a bit safe.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The problem with "essential apps like navigation and music" being hidden in an overly complex control set is that navigation and music are neither one essential to drive a car. Windshield wipers, heater, defroster, and in some places air conditioning are the next most essential things to control after the throttle, brake, steering, and shifter. Mirrors, seats, steering column angle, and steering column length aren't even necessary to adjust during driving. They can and generally should be adjusted while stopped. Until pretty recently in the history of cars very few had adjustable steering columns.
Here's to wishing more people would learn to use the damned turn signals, the currently most common version of which Buick introduced in 1940 FFS.