3: Car 🚘 User Experience - Driving
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- Can any of you relate to this experience? Ever since I got this Jeep, I get in the car and I plug in my phone and I start backing out of the driveway. And the car, it's like it says, "Hey, he's back. I bet you want some tunes. Let's play him something." And the phone's like, "Yeah, well, he doesn't subscribe to Apple Music, but he has bought some MP3s on iTunes over the past 20 years. So let's play him all those songs in alphabetical order." What's alphabetically first in the queue of my entire iTunes purchase history?

Angel Gone by Beat Happening. Oh yeah. So, getting some eggs? Angel Gone.

Going to a meeting? Angel gone. Bringing a bereaved widow to a funeral? Angel gone. I don't know what your desert island band is, but I know it's not determined by an alphabetical list of your iTunes purchase history. So in this episode, we're exploring the UX of cars. Why is it that a $50,000 car can have a UI that's worse than a $50 tablet?

Where is this market heading? And where would you like us to steer it? Today we're here with the Smythe Group design team and we've got our engineer, Paul. Hey, I'm Paul. Designer, Aaron. Hello. User advocate, Rob. Hello, everyone. And I'm Hirami.

Okay, guys, what are we dealing with here? What is going on? The user experience of driving a car is as much about the entertainment as it is to getting us safely from our house to Starbucks. Yeah. I own an old grandma car. I like to tell people that it's a brand new 1999 Subaru Legacy. Nice. Yeah.

but what frustrates me the most is the disparity between different manufacturers you know I'm a little frustrated by things like that having to turn the key to figure out what the mileage is you know where I'm at do I need to stop to get gas before I go where I'm going yeah that's a good point yeah and

Most of what we're talking about today is internal. What's going on inside the car? And that's where most of the innovation has happened in cars. It's what's inside, what it's made of. But so little has been done outside of that. There's been no innovation or adoption of anything that allows a car to communicate with another car or with a traffic light system or the highways. And we're left relying on a horn that hasn't changed.

In a hundred years? Like that's the only way you can communicate with the driver in front of you. It seems like that's an untapped area. There's so many different things that we're trying to communicate with that one archaic horn. There's the, hey, I know you, look at me. And then there's the, hey, uh,

I don't want to bother you, but you're sitting at a red light. Would you mind moving? You know, there's that sound. And then there's what the heck? I hope you die. You have to communicate that by like revity and force, but it's the same sound. I have these fantasies about telling the dude tailgating me to back off in this sort of LED spelled letter message on my bum

Right. There are kind of these super archaic methods of communication between cars, but I worry about putting more room for color in communicating with other cars because of what we've seen with things like social media. That's all we need is highway trolls. Exactly. But I do wish that there should be a device in every car that says, I am a car and I am here. How many accidents would be prevented? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

So let's talk about that then. What role does safety play in the design of automotive UX? Our cars are complex machines. They're made of pulleys and belts and cogs.

I moonlight as a mechanic. I have no idea how cars work. But over time, cars have been assimilated by computers. And I think it's best to just listen to YouTube mechanic Scotty Kilmer. Today I'm going to show you how to fix the insane complexity of modern cars. Now realize in modern cars almost everything is run by computers. From the variable valve timing of the engine to the shifting of the automatic transmissions.

Even the air conditioning systems are run by computers. And when these computer systems break down, as all electronic systems do,

You need to use another computer to analyze and fix them. So no offense to our podcast, but I think it would be more entertaining to just listen to Scotty Kilmer YouTube videos. But he's just making a point that our cars are just computers on wheels. And so now today we're in this time where consumers expect dynamic, responsive interfaces. Oh no, we don't want to be limited by knobs and switches.

car manufacturers just ask themselves, what would Steve Jobs do? - Well, what we're gonna do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen. A giant screen.

Now, how are we going to do this? Great idea, Steve Jobs. And that's what cars are doing today. But Buick beat Steve Jobs to the punch by 21 years. I would like to introduce to you the 1986 Buick Riviera. It had a cathode ray tube display, which is basically those green and black giant monitors we have in school, in the computer labs if you're that old. It was touch sensitive. It had two LEDs.

8-bit microprocessor and it was capable of 13,000 words of memory for the graphics according to Motor Week Review. So 13,000 words is 13 kilowords? It touches you.

But that's how they did it on the 1986 Buick Riviera. It could control your climate, it could control the radio, display trip information, it even had an animated fan when the fan was on. Pretty high tech, ahead of its time. And save for the 1980s graphics and this insane loud beeping that it would do every time you pressed one of the buttons, the interface is really similar to the touchscreens found in cars today. They made the same design decisions as they do now.

and when they reviewed it, MotorWeek was left with this question. - But the questions arise. Is the CRT really necessary? And is there a built-in danger of looking away from the road while you're trying to use it? - Buick ended up dropping that system in 1990 after users found it onerous and distracting. Popular Mechanics said that it violates the first commandment of ergonomics. You must take your eyes off the road to make any adjustments. - Yes.

Sage wisdom. So here we are today, right? That's the problem that all modern cars are facing now that they're putting in these infotainment systems. Yeah, like Tesla has just a big screen. Yeah, and some are wisely finding a happy medium between the all screen, the Steve Jobs dream and keeping dials to turn the volume up and down. And that makes for a better experience, in my opinion. The fact is that

distracted driving. We know it's very dangerous. In 2013, it caused over 3,000 deaths, 400,000 accident-related injuries. When you're looking down, you don't know what you're touching or if it's responding to your touch in the way you want it to. If you have to navigate a menu, you're distracted.

It's just as bad as texting and driving, right? Yeah, absolutely. Well, and if you want people to stay looking at the road, don't give them a complex jigsaw puzzle to turn the air conditioner on or off, right? Like that, if you have to look down at that thing for five, 10 seconds just to figure out, you know, how to put the air on, I mean, how much distance can you travel in that much time? How many deaths can be eliminated by them making sensible design decisions? I think that's super important.

No matter how great the interface is, you're the biggest threat to your safety when it comes to driving a car. And that's why self-driving cars is really exciting to me and to, it seems, every manufacturer surprisingly adopting this at a really fast rate. So there are different levels of self-driving. There's zero, which is nothing. So that's a car from the 40s or 50s. And then

Level 1, there's some driver assistance. So think of anti-lock brakes. It's doing the pumping of your brake for you. That's self-driving to an extent. Cruise control would be considered level 1. And now more cars are shipping with level 2, where lane assistance is keeping you in your lane. If it sees an object and thinks you're going to hit it, it can apply brakes for you.

adaptive cruise. You set your cruise control, but it'll slow down and speed up to keep with traffic. You don't have to be hitting the brakes, turning your cruise control on and off. And then there's level three, which drives for you. It does all the functions that a driver would do, but it's just not good enough. It might need you to take over at some point. Tesla is kind of in that area where you keep your hand on the wheel, but it's doing all the driving on the highway and can exit off the highway for you. Backseat driver mode engaged.

Are you sure you want to go that way? You should take Maine to fifth. You mean you have to use your hands? That's like a baby's toy. Yes. It's level four. It drives in most conditions, but it's still not like 100%. And then there's level five where you just get in a car and you tell it where to go and it drives for you.

So right now, today, we're in two. We're dipping our toes into three real soon. And it presents some problems. And it really makes me think of something from our first podcast on credit card terminals. Because sometimes they ask you if you want cash back. Sometimes they don't ask you. You might be wondering...

What does that have to do with a self-driving car? Well, that is an inconsistent experience and that affects the user experience. You don't know what you're going to get. But replace signatures or having to put in a chip or swipe with something a little more serious. Sometimes they prevent you from veering into oncoming traffic. Sometimes they don't prevent you from veering into oncoming traffic. They need to make it more universal, make it more consistent.

So we're talking about not this frustrating experience, but your life. What happens if you don't take over in time? What if you don't notice? What if you've been lulled into a state of unawareness of your surroundings? How do you keep a user engaged? Because it means their lives. It seems like all of technology and social media is driven towards making us not pay attention to anything that's actually in front of us. You got your apps going. You got your notifications. You got your tabs open.

Oh, I got retweeted. That's exciting. My Subaru that has some of these level two features, it's just beeping at you all the time. Every time it's making a decision, it wants you to know. It's like, hey, I did something. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Sometimes it doesn't tell you what it did, but it did something. And you're just going to tune them out over time. So that really does create some problems.

What I think is the best user experience for all these level 2 features are those emergency ones. It slams on the brake and it saves a person's life or lessens the severity of an unavoidable accident. That's the best user experience. A user that is still alive. You know what that guy knows? It's the importance of safety.

Yeah, so for now we're stuck with having a lot of tasks that we need to accomplish in the car, sometimes while we're driving. Finding your favorite radio station used to be simple. Not so anymore. Many new cars come with high-tech infotainment systems that Consumer Reports' John Linkoff says can be very complicated. What's odd is that you have a knob down here that controls the screen up here,

Like Aaron, remember when we worked at the ad agency together? Before OS X had Spotlight, what was that thing you always used to search? Quicksilver. Quicksilver. Quicksilver. Yes. I remember Quicksilver. And I remember that made me anxious because...

I could see that it was leading to less and less data organization in our art directors folders and stuff. But that's how we've kind of like become used to finding stuff. And in a car, I think a lot of manufacturers are trying to do that too with voice activated search. And maybe we all just want to be Knight Rider. - It was a Pontiac Trans Am supercar. - Might as well put on some music. - What would you like to hear? - It talked.

It did weird things, it drove by itself. But the problem with that is, of course, that in the car you're with other people. You've got road noise, you've got kids screaming, you've got your friend telling you about their day. Voice controls just aren't there yet. So you've still got these options. You've got your temperature control, your audio control, your navigation controls, and they need to be organized in a console in some fashion, right? And what we're talking about is information architecture.

Information architecture has a lot of parity with traditional architecture. And you can really hear that when you listen to an architect plan out a house. The idea of where things are and how they interrelate adjacencies and the opportunities of the sun.

He's concerned with the organization and making things accessible and inviting. Those are basically the same concerns we have when we design an app. But the problem is, we've taken these principles from experiences that have our dedicated attention and then thrown them in the middle of the car.

Just like a big old tablet right in the middle with the same nested files and navigation like the rooms of a house. So even if you want to change the temp, you might have to tap on the settings menu and then comfort sub menu and then your personality profile and then your seat quadrant. And I'm exaggerating a little bit barely, right?

Really, if we were to look at that metaphor of a house, the driver is a little bit more like a cook, wouldn't you say? That shouldn't be taking their eyes off the frying pan. We don't really want him having to go to different rooms for stuff. We don't even really want him having to fish through a bunch of drawers in the kitchen. Conversely, he doesn't want all of his tools piled up in an unorganized mess on the counter. So the French have a term for this, it's called "mise en place".

Anyone familiar? I have mise en place every evening. It's delicious. It's delicious. So...

Mise en place, it's a methodology that French chefs insist on where instead of cutting and measuring and peeling and grating things as you need them, you get that already beforehand. It's all nice dishes. In fact, when you watch a cooking show, you notice that it's like way easier on the cooking show and way more enjoyable to watch them cook than it is to actually follow them as you're cooking. And that's because everything is in its place.

Having all ingredients prepared allows you to focus on what's happening in your pots and pans. Peaceful and it's safe because the work is done in advance. Oh, mise en place. Oh, not mise... Oh, mise en place? Or...

Anyways, you can see a correlation there with what we're talking about, right? When we're talking about UI in a car, when you need to be focused on one thing, it would be good if everything was organized in advance and came to you in the right order so that you don't have to distract yourself from the task at hand.

I don't think a car system should be this complicated because it's not safe to try to navigate through the system while you're driving. You know, when you're watching a cooking show, those people don't even have to really look at what they're dumping in. If we take that back to our car UI,

Touchscreens may not always be the answer for car controls. And for one thing, they're quickly outdated. But that aside, they're also not providing us with the tactile feedback that we need to keep our attention on the road. So for that, we might just leave everything that needs to be on our phone on our phone. Let's mise en place our car UI. Could we make preparation a part of something that we do before we get in the car?

You know, I don't think it's that uncommon for us to plan our destination before we get in the car, right? I mean, hey Google,

What's the traffic like on the way to Minnesota today? There's light traffic from your location to Minnesota, so it'll take about 27 hours. Okay, so now it's already on my phone. The same for audio, right? Like, do we really need to choose what we're going to listen to while we're driving? Or were we already listening to ID8 Episode 3 before we got in the car? And now when we get in the car, it just...

It keeps playing. But the question we need to ask for ourselves, why would we obfuscate our phone's UI for those things with a worse interface, with a more cumbersome interface that causes us to have to give it more attention? Why do we have to clip our phones to the air vents? I couldn't get it out of my head, Rob. The picture of your iPad in your car just up there. And I just, I keep thinking to myself, really everybody's bringing their own screen to their car anyway.

You know, if for me, if I was designing a car, I would love it if you could just like slide your iPad into the slot or slide your iPhone into the slot. That becomes the screen. Then the auto manufacturers don't have to make those decisions that just end up being terrible. That's what what airlines ended up doing.

right? They spent who knows how much money making these different interfaces for that tiny screen, the back of the chair in front of you. And they realized, you know what? Forget it. And they ripped all those things out and now they just have an app and everyone just brings their own iPads and it saved them money. The planes are lighter and everyone's able to use what they bring and turned out great. Seems like that's

That's a great model for the auto industry. Stop making these complicated interfaces. You can't hire people who are good at it because they're all at Apple and Google. So just make it plug in and have them just plug in their phones or their iPads.

Why are they doubling the efforts of something that we're gonna update on our own every year? The thing in my car I can't update ever, so if I keep my car longer than my iPad it will quickly become outdated. And, right? Like, yeah, it just seems like that would be a much more elegant solution. - B-Y-O-S. - Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Auto manufacturers are already using the same parts, generally speaking, in a lot of their models. The same electrical circuits and the same dash systems. It makes sense to me that Ford could build an application that just uses all those same components. And then there's an app for all the platforms.

Why not in this day and age? Clearly the automotive manufacturers are cutting costs in that hardware department, right? They're putting crappy displays in our cars, probably because it's not very profitable for them to put high-end stuff in there. So if they just made a big hole in the dash, they could upsell on adapters every two years. Every time someone gets a new phone or a tablet, which they will, they can go back to Ford.com and

order a new converter or piece of plastic that's going to cost them two cents on that dollar to create and have an additional revenue stream and people would be happier. I mean, the dongle industry is already. Yes. Take a cue from Apple and just turn your car into a big rat's nest of dongles. The Ford dongle.

I mean, call me old fashioned, I like a good analog dial or a button with a little light that shows me whether it's on or off. - Yeah, absolutely. That's a part of this problem, some of these all touchscreen controlled things. You don't get physical feedback. - You could take a tip from Tony Fadell. - Yeah, iPod and Nesca. - Yeah, exactly. - If you think about a car, what's a car? A car has batteries, it has a computer, it has a motor, and it has mechanical structure.

If you look at an iPhone, it has all the same things. It even has a motor in it. So if you try to say and scale it up and go, oh my God, I can make a car with those same components. There's some truth to that. But basically, like if you look at those two products that he's famous for having been involved in, they really are a joy to use. And the difference between those products and other digital products we're used to is that they have a tactile response.

That wheel on the iPod, I missed that. I wish that was in more stuff. The wheel on the Nest, if you've played around with that, it just feels right. So we could utilize that in the car. You wouldn't have to look at it. You're just using that to navigate. And maybe we could put the visual feedback up as a reflection item underneath our windshield. So you don't have to take your eyes off the road as you're navigating controls like that. In the future, autonomous vehicles will really take a lot of these things out of our concern, right?

Navigation would be no concern if our cars drove themselves. And if the biometrics built into our smartwatches could communicate with our cars, we wouldn't have to tell it that I'm hot or I'm cold. Just change it for me. Make me comfortable right away. Leaving really just entertainment design. But if we didn't have to drive, well, the entertainment design in the car would be completely different. But that time's not here yet. So in the meantime, I think those would be my suggestions. I like the mise en place as a design principle for cars.

Keep things where they need to be when people need them, but not necessarily all crammed into one little area so that your focus is always being sucked in on this one area of the car. Yeah, absolutely.

So Rob, you were going to talk to us about some of the ideation that's already going on online. What did you find? Yeah, sure. So I was able to find a few examples of people really thinking about this stuff in a modern sense. And some people went too far where they're just like, well, everything's going to be autonomous and let's invent the UI that doesn't have to deal with people controlling things, which maybe that's the ultimate future, but it doesn't help anyone now.

And so two or three examples that I found here, the guys that made Monument Valley,

this amazing iOS puzzle game, and they had this brilliant reimagination of the car user experience. And they went so far as to not only build prototypes, they also built a GitHub repo. Their rethink is highly contextual. So they give a big screen like most modern car UIs, but their implementation of it is like, you don't need all this stuff all the time. Like I don't need a speedometer when I'm backing up. The screen should become the back camera.

You don't need the speedometer until you start driving. Why should that take up a big portion of your heads-up display? And so if we really are headed towards an electric future, do we really need to know how hot the engine is? Do we really need to know all that stuff all the time? When we engage drive and move away, you'll see that the range segment transitions to the right and the speed segment takes the screen. If we slow to a stop, the range segment transitions back. We call this approach adaptive hierarchy.

showing the most contextually relevant information to the driver. So that was one example. Yeah, I like the idea of kind of just a big screen. I was reading up a lot about the design, the engineering process. You know, basically it takes about one to five years, which is the consensus from around the web, from drawings to prototypes till a car actually hits the showroom and is up for sale to the general public. So at some point in that process, they're going to have to start thinking about the receiver or the head unit or screens and...

How big is the opening? Where is it placed in relation to the other components? Like the thing that's really going to probably be pretty bottom of the barrel as far as the priority goes is going to be that system because you have the safety, aerodynamics, horsepower. But if we're the OEM, I would say let's make some of those UX decisions first. Contract it out to somebody, clearly define their boundaries and then give them enough flexibility so that in parallel you can design this experience.

Because to me, that is the thing that's literally in your face the most. Yeah, this is sort of an ever-present problem in the development space of anything. Whether it's a software project or a physical object like a car or anything else. Where do you start? You know, we would advocate for design from the beginning, but a lot of the time it's sort of tacked on at the end. And if they would think about it from the start, you could maybe make all these things modular and controllable. B-Y-O-S. Yeah.

Awesome. So the future of cars is very much in flux, but there's plenty of room for improvement. Less lightning around this. What do you guys want to see different in automotive UX? Just give us a port. Give us Bluetooth. Provide basic controls for heat, etc. Leave the entertainment up to the customer and just give us the analog switches that we all want. Sweet. I love it.

I want level five self-driving capabilities. I want the car experience to just change to an entertainment and productivity experience. Yeah, love it. And I just have one request. How do you cry? Please stop. You're making all the wrong new ex-conciliations for me. Stop playing this song. We have no more.

Well, that's about all we have for this episode. Thanks again for joining us. As always, we'd love to hear your input. Tweet us at ideatepodcast. That's our handle. And check out our website where we have blog posts for each of these episodes, links to all of our references and our videos. You can find us at thesmithgroup.com. Thanks again for hanging out, guys. Take care. Heart, shit, wings, and hair Spin your fable The music we were

Then the harp strings started breaking me to pieces