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

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.