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

[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.