near misses in user interfaces

[cellio]

Yesterday the "low tire pressure" light on my car came on. (I've never had a "low tire pressure" light before.) The tire gauge didn't show anything to be concerned about and the light went off again after a couple miles, so I'm not sure what that was about. (It was not the coldest recent day, at least at the time it happened.) But there was a fundamental flaw in the UI: it didn't tell me which tire it suspected, so I had to check all of them. Given that they've obviously got sensors in each tire, how much harder would it have been to transmit that information and add four little dots or something to the light, lighting the ones(s) where problems were detected? (Hey Honda, if you do this, position them intelligently -- don't follow the bad design of the burner knobs on many stoves.)

On my previous car, you move the lever up to turn on the wipers and down for a single pass. On my current car it's the reverse. That's taking some getting used to. Neither is obviously better; I wish the industry would just choose one.

Another in the "it's not just about you, mister designer" class: every microwave oven I've ever used has a numeric keypad, with "start" and "stop" buttons to either side of the "0". On the microwave at home, "start" is on the right. At work, it's on the left. As a result I get this wrong about one time in five. (It's not as if I -- or most users, I suspect -- actually read the button; we use positional memory, which works for numbers and fails for start/stop.) People change microwaves more often than they change cars, I suspect, so it would be nice if the industry would settle on a standard. Either one would be fine if it were predictable.

Comments

[egoldberg.livejournal.com]

Totally agreed. It amazes me, in particular, how inconsistent the interfaces are to microwave ovens --- I always have to get help using a new one for the first time!

I, too, wonder why there isn't a standard by now.

[cellio]

I suspect that to get a standard you need either explicit consensus (and what's in it for them?) or an early market leader that everyone else copies. But this is just speculation; I haven't made a study of it.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Our brand-new Toyota makes sure that the dashboard instrument panel lights up automatically if it's dark enough to need it. Our old one didn't do that -- the lights only turned on when you turned on your headlights.

Because of this, I've now driven off without my headlights on a half-dozen times. Hey, the dashboard lights are on, the headlights must be on, too, right?

[cellio]

That would be annoying.

My Honda Fit lights the dashboard all the time. This means I have to look for the green "lights on" indicator (which is prominent), but at least it's consistent.

[alaricmacconnal.livejournal.com]

Our microwave has an "Add 1 Minute" button. So, I think, it will add one more minute to the time I've typed in, right. No, it starts the microwave on high for one minute :)

[cellio]

That's just wrong. If they say "add" or "+", rather than just "1 minute", they should do that.

[happyingreen.livejournal.com]

I was at Temple Sinai and looked for you. I was with my son.

[cellio]

Drat. I'm sorry I missed you! (Figures -- the first time in months that I'm not there...)

different industries' standards

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

Have you ever noticed that the numbers on a phone keypad have 1 2 3 as the top row while the numbers on a computer keyboard have 7 8 9 as the top row?

I didn't notice until I got a job that involved making lots of phone calls, often while typing/looking up phone numbers on the computer at the same time. For some reason I tend to make more 3 vs 9 and 1 vs 7 errors and fewer 2 vs 8 errors.

Re: different industries' standards

[cellio]

Yeah, I have noticed that. I think it would drive me nuts. Fortunately for me, I don't use the numeric keypad on my computer.

Does the computer keyboard mimic adding machines of yore? I can't remember. It seems to be consistent with pocket calculators.

Interface design

[byronhaverford.livejournal.com]

A lot of my reserach is in interface design. The most glaring errors are always from systems designed by a bunch of engineers who have never had to use the software. So do you think this is a variant on the the same problem (although less obviously so -- you figure the Honda engineering team is forced to drive Hondas, right? Rather, the engineers so rarely have a tire go limp that they don't actually get exposed to that aspect of the interface.) Or do you think that this is a conscious design, intended to increase the likelihood that you take your car in for service at a local Honda repair shop?

Re: Interface design

[cellio]

The most glaring errors are always from systems designed by a bunch of engineers who have never had to use the software.

Or have used it enough that they've gotten used to its quirks and think it's perfectly reasonable to type control-alt-@ twice quickly to save a file. :-) I've seen both problems.

Or do you think that this is a conscious design, intended to increase the likelihood that you take your car in for service at a local Honda repair shop?

Or, as someone else suggested, designed to make you check all the tires while you've got the gauge out anyway. I hadn't considered tha possibility.

tires and microwaves

[brokengoose.livejournal.com]

It's possible that the lack of indicator for the tire pressure warning is intentional. First, they might want you to take the opportunity to check all of the tires, so they withhold information to encourage that. Second, there are some ways of monitoring tire pressure that don't provide a lot of detail. (Check out this wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire_Pressure_Monitoring_System) for details) I can imagine that those systems might only detect "something's wrong with the whole system" and not "the right front tire is low".

As for microwaves, I really want a microwave with two analog dials: one for time and a second for power. Kind of like the cheap ones that were common 15-20 years ago. I bought one last year that had a dial, but it wasn't what I hoped for. Rather than the old spring-loaded analog dial, this was more like a big mouse scroll wheel. Each "click" is another increment, and the increments are non-linear. The first five clicks are seconds. The next 5 are 5-second increments. The next ten or so are 10-second increments. Then 30 seconds. etc. So, a minute is about a half-turn. Five minutes is 3/4 turn. It takes about two minutes to heat a cold cup of coffee, and I can never hit the two minute mark without a lot of fiddling. I'd just press the "add minute" button twice, but it only works once per job. And, of course, they couldn't resist adding a bunch of other buttons and hiding the "start" button among them. I've successfully dialed in the time and then hit "cancel" more than once.

Re: tires and microwaves

[cellio]

Tires: ah, that would make sense -- assume (correctly, I think) that people will only check what htey have to, and if one tire is low others might be, so keep it vague. And thanks for the Wikipedia link; I'm still getting used to what you can and can't find there.

Microwave: I, too, would like two dials; I haven't seen a dial in probably 20 years. The one you describe sounds like an attempt to be clever that misfired; yes, if you're cooking something for 10 minutes you don't want to have to turn and turn and turn and turn, but on the other hand, the precision of, say, 2:15 versus 2:00 or 2:30 can matter, and fiddling is a pain. I think (off the top of my head) that if I were doing it I might do concentric dials for minutes and seconds, let each go in both directions, and dispense with the 5-second unit entirely. But before I got that far in a real design, I would find out what kinds of times people most commonly enter and where the corner cases are.

[geekosaur]

On my previous car, you move the lever up to turn on the wipers and down for a single pass. On my current car it's the reverse.

And on my current (and previous) car you move the lever down to turn on the wipers and pull it toward you for a single pass. Consistency? Who needs it? :)

[cellio]

Now I'm trying to remember if my Mazda did that, because it sounds vaguely familiar.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

The thing that usually throws me off about microwaves is the timer feature. After the "okay, where's the button on this one?" hunt, there's the "okay, do I start it by hitting 'start' or by hitting 'timer'?". I've also seen the variation where the timer is invoked by cooking with the power level set to 0. The most recent microwave is annoying, because the timer is a level down--you push one button to bring up a menu with two options (1: Timer; 2: Set Clock) and then have to hit '1' to get to the timer. The first time I tried to use it I just hit Timer 3 3 0 and then wondered what was going on.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I loathe the interface to microwaves (http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/51546.html). Electronic car window controls are second on my list, being completely arbitrary in whether you push forward to lower the window or to raise it.

My largest current problem is in using both Windows and OSX computers at the same time. When I had one at home and one at work, it was vaguely possible to retain correct muscle memory for each (at home I have a trackball on the left, at work, a mouse on the right, so there is some environmental cue). Now that I use both at home.. and sometimes VNC from one machine into the other.. outright confusion.

(quite accidentally and luckily, most keyboard shortcuts standard for one OS are benign on the other, but it is still very annoying)

It does seem like dots indicating which tire would have been appropriate. Weren't there cars over a decade ago that would show you on a diagram which door was not completely latched? I seem to recall having a Pontiac that did that.