Hacker News Reader

Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

And I wonder if the car manufacturers are even listening (to us).

In some ways the current state of car interior design reminds the 1990s and 2000s of computers and mobile phones. Everything was so ugly and unusable that when proper industrial design finally came into the industry, the guy responsible for it got knighthood and worldwide recognition of a genius.

(To be fair a few companies did try to make their devices look well-designed and luxury, such as Sony, but then Sony never understood software. Industrial design without software is nothing.)

Whereas all it takes for any electronics or car manufacturer is to have someone C-level with a good taste to approve or disapprove designs. Which got me thinking, maybe at this point the humanity needs to come up with some measure of good taste similar to IQ...

View on HN

The real problem is… who are "us" in this sentence?

For a fairly intuitive UI, check out the Tesla, particularly in its latest incarnations. In my estimation it is at least as usable as most tablets, and very discoverable.

However, look online and you will discover a litany of people who decry the lack of physical buttons to control everything.

Car UI is hard, not just because it is hard, but because there are many different groups of "us", and we have all grown used to different forms of car UI, BMW vs Ford for example.

> litany of people who decry the lack of physical buttons to control everything

So how about you as a car manufacturer make these people happy but with an even better design than they expected?

Car usability is not subjective, it can easily be measured. For example, how often do drivers adjust the audio volume while driving? If they are doing it less often it means the volume function is less usable (the driver feels it would be unsafe to try and use the function). And so on.

I'm convinced that Tesla UI is only good because they're not afraid to continuously iterate on the design.

The best way to improve a complex human interaction task like a vehicle is with experimentation and incremental improvements—and the touch screen allows the pace of that feedback loop to be an order of magnitude faster than a physical interface.

All they need is a few more buttons for the most common tasks on the steering wheel and the Model 3 design would be greatly improved.

> Tesla UI is only good because they're not afraid to continuously iterate on the design

I'm not sure this is a good thing. Poorly designed physical things will stick for a long time and might damage the reputation of your company. Tesla's reputation is not great precisely for that reason. I remember people were saying that Tesla would be "the Apple for cars" before their first cars left the factory. Nobody says that anymore.

> The best way to improve a complex human interaction task like a vehicle is with experimentation and incremental improvements.

You have to be careful to differentiate between improvements vs. change. You need to know when to stop (or at least slow down the rate of change) otherwise it's just a random walk.

> Industrial design without software is nothing.

It saved Apple (iMac)

iMac and OS X in a bundle is what saved Apple (along with the iPod of course)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com