zlacker

Car dashboard lights meet most of these criteria and yet they are routinely bad. My partner had trouble figuring out the "flat tire" icon and they are a fairly intelligent, well-educated person. The icon was basically a circle with an exclamation point inside. The fact that it had a slightly flat edge actually made it harder to recognize as a wheel since we normally associate wheels as being perfectly round. It almost looked more like a steering wheel. There was no status code to look up, only an icon which they had to match visually against every other possible icon. And this is one of the most common warning lights to appear in a car, so imagine how much harder the more obscure ones are.

Roombas, which the article mentions don't use voice, actually did start using voice in the last couple of generations. And it's great. It tells you that it's stuck rather than just beeping sadly at you.

I'm not necessarily saying the car dashboard should speak warnings, as it may startle people on the highway, but I also think there's a lot to improve on.

>>sholla+(OP)
the tire pressure indicator light (and most of the other lights on a car dashboard) is one of those icons that isn't necessarily easy to decode, but it's ubiquitous enough that changing it to something new would be worse. Maybe your partner didn't know what it means, but enough other people do that odds are the first person they asked would have been able to tell them.

>>sholla+(OP)
Here's one explanation: I work as an HMI designer for an Automotive OEM. Since we have a fully digital driver display, I designed a feature to address your problem; it displayed a large graphic with a text explanation of what was happening.

Unfortunately, it was killed by our Customer Care team, who were, paradoxically, more concerned about giving the driver/customer negative information that might lead to complaints, buybacks, etc. Needless to say, there are many stories like this, and it shows that even though UX/UI design is the most apparent aspect of a product, it is only as good as the decisions made underneath it.

>>sholla+(OP)
I recently rode in a car which, when started, lit up the dashboard display with the message “Correct tire pressure.” That took a moment to decipher, too. (Is the pressure correct, or am I supposed to correct it? And if you have sensors in all the tires to tell me that one’s flat—why not mention that info in the error message?) Evidently clearly stating “your tire is flat” is a big challenge for car designers...