Trials and Tribulations of UI design: An examination of the Focus SVT dashboard...
Well, I don't drive my car very often, but I figured I'd drive it down to the DOL and get my tabs renewed today. They had been expired about 4 months or so and I'm sure the neighborhood patrol officer was eyeing the car for a towing.
So I start the car for the first time in probably a couple of months (yeah, I know I should be starting it more often), and up pops up a friggin status light. Now the car is riddled with status light locations, probably about 30 little circular areas on the dashboard for status lights. Many of them do the standard things like gas low, lights on, brights activated, and the turn signals. However, many of them go unused. So who in the hell designs a UI with a bunch of static locations for displaying single bit flag type data? Well, car manufacturers do and they do it ALL of the time. Check your own car out if you don't believe me. And if you can't find 30 little locations for bit status lights then look a little harder because a lot of times they fit these lights in places you would never expect.
Anyway, the status light this time is around the perimeter of the dashboard area. It happens that there is a 6 circle arc on each side of the instruments. That amounts to 12 of the status lights, only a few of which I knew anything about. After all, the *red* status lights show up on the right side. Seat-belt not on, engine failure, the important stuff (people probably recognize lights on the right side better?). The left side is completely unknown. I think the gas low light is over there, and these shine bright yellow. The status light today is a circular black spike ring (think the Blam! style outlines), with a big exclamation point in the middle. Okay, this HAS to be really bad. I drive on anyway, since I want my tabs, while dialing Ford.
So the service lady is extremely helpful. She has to confirm all of my vitals (address, phone, etc...) before she can answer my question (thank god this was a car exploding in 10 seconds light). After this she has to find a quick reference list of all of the various status lights. Finally, she locates the appropriate status light and spews off the most elaborate name I've ever heard of for such a simple yellow light. The name of this light happens to be the Multi-Functional Automatic Transaxle Pulley System light. Supposedly it tells me that my car didn't properly adjust the sport suspension when the car started (judging by the fact I hadn't driven the car in two months, I'm not surprised). Basically this thing was trying to tell me that maybe my cold tire pressure was a bit too low, or that some setting had occurred in my suspension, etc... etc... Looking back maybe they shouldn't have made the light a big exclamation point, because IMO this wasn't something to get all that excited about.
The magic happens when you turn the car off and back on though. Turns out the system automatically re-adjusts while driving and then resets the status led after cycling the driving computer. It also turns out that this problem can happen if you try to drive the car too quickly after starting it (something like 2 seconds after the car is on you actually have to have it in gear and moving for this to happen). However, they get this problem all the time (what in the hell, driving only 2 seconds after starting the car? I spend that much time putting my seat belt on at the persistence of the much annoying red blinking light and tone that is on the right side of the dash) apparently, and most of the time it fixes itself.
The point from the computer side of things is how easy it is to confuse the user. I was certainly confused when this thing came on. Car UI's are different in nearly every make and model, so it is hard to draw on your knowledge to diagnose problems when a status light kicks in. Many lights are self-explanatory though and follow rules. I guess they don't have a rule for a MFATPS light yet, and until they do I have to be confused by the yellow exclamation point whenever I drive my car after long periods of sitting. Makes you wonder why they choose 30 status light locations over something simpler like an LED read-out. Then they could have scrolled the problem across a nice screen perhaps with some helpful information. One can always dream I guess.