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Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

>each with 20+ branching questions

I just recoiled in horror at the thought of my car company asking me to fill out a survey like this and mentally closed the window on it.

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Imagine that your car has a few things that bother you, and you'd like the car company to know about it. A link to a survey appears in email, and you think: "Aha! Now I'll let them know for sure, I'll tell them all I think about it!". Now you have 20 question to vent off your frustration, and likely a large text field for "anything more you might like to add".

It'd be cathartic if Audi sent a questionnaire to my wife to ask her about the dashboard GUI. ("Only a German engineer could design such a thing.", which is a bit harsh: there are plenty of thermostat designers who could do worse.)

The fact that iOS 12 now supports 3rd party apps (==Google Maps) on CarPlay has been a life saver.

imo Audi/VW has the best dashboard GUI in the auto business bar BMW iDrive. Try using honda or toyota and you will see that it can be much much worse than audi, laggy and badly designed.

They have a nice LCD panel but they decided to not make it touch-enabled. So to enter a street address you're supposed to draw the characters with your finger Palm-Pilot-style on a crappy touchpad. It's absurd. That's on a 2018 model. I think they're fixing that in some of the 2019 models.

It's not the touchpad that annoys me, it's the fact that I generally seem to have to enter the address in the most non-intuitive order for it to find anything, e.g. first postcode, then street name, then street number.

First world problems, I guess.

They don't do this to annoy you but to allow you to keep your eyes on the road more frequently. You are supposed to draw the characters blindly, without looking at the touchpad. They carried out user tests that demonstrated that a real touchscreen captures the driver's attention to a much stronger degree than this system. It might look limiting and obsolete on first glance, but it reduces risks to life and health of all involved parties.

I've done this, multiple times, when the airline I frequently fly follows up after a flight. I've noticed that they're pretty good with their timing such that they'll expedite the survey trigger after a flight that had a delay or some other kind of issue. As someone who flies this particular airline a lot, it's nice being able to voice my exact issues in a nuanced manner while also singling out what worked well. I do this with hope and expectation that my voice will be heard and may influence future decisions.

Having owned a dozen cars, shopped for far more, desired features and options that the manufacturers don't give, and finally buying ONE car brand-new, I relished the opportunity to actually have my voice heard for once.

I get a survey every time I take my car to the dealer. I like it. Sometimes there are some chuckleheaded things a dealership does, or maybe they are very helpful, but either way, I can provide feedback to the manufacturer on my experience, and I like to think maybe they'll be able to change things for the better.

In a world where every other site tries to infer what I like or I want or what they think i want to see on my feed next, or put me in some marketing bucket, it's a breath of fresh air to just be asked what I like or don't like or may be interested in.

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