Comment by fps_doug | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fps_doug | Hacker News Reader

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Never been in such a car, but just reading this drives me mad. How can things go that wrong in pretty much every regard?

Sorry for this ranty attitude right now but how do so many things that we technically figured out perfectly get shittier and shittier? We fortunately slowly come to realize how important automated testing, integration tests etc. are to make software development better and faster in the long run, but do we in turn just stop thinking about if what we're currently doing actually makes sense? Take a step back for a second?

I don't want to be the crazy guy shouting more regulation every time something goes wrong, but I really wonder if we're in need for some up to date rules about what makes a car safe for traffic and what doesn't that specifically has UX in mind. Entirely ban touch screens or buttons with no tactile feedback from cars for example. Today you have dash gauges that lag behind by a second. If the trend continues, by tomorrow we have software driven AI cloud based brakes that are delayed by a second or two.

I suspect it's a case of the "designers" being addicted to the "new and fresh" paradigm and not caring about anything but trying to redesign everything they can.

I'm not a fan of regulation either, but I have a feeling that if the operation of the steering wheel or pedals weren't standardised, we'd have even crazier car UIs with their own self-consistent-but-globally-inconsistent designs. ("Turn the steering wheel clockwise to make a left turn --- because you're changing the view in the windscreen, not the content behind it!")

The regulation that required the shift quadrant to be in the PRNDL order many decades ago seems almost quaint in comparison:

https://jalopnik.com/why-prndl-5870701

(...and as the mentions about the horrible Jeep shifter in the other comments here allude to, maybe that regulation has laxed over the years.)

How about social decay? Would Renault's management in the sixties have accepted this level of incompetence?

Maybe a case of making your mark as a designer by hunting for seemingly low hanging fruits. So every newly hired designer will try to get some of his ideas squeezed into a new model. Instead of a conservative approach less "revolutionary" approach. At least that's my theory for why UX of almost anything nowadays seems to decline with every iteration.

It's all about layers of management where such things aren't possibly taken into account. The mechanical gauges don't have delay by their nature, so everyone expects the software ones also to not have any. But when the work is signed off, no one explicitly has power or resources to stop the production because of that.

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