Seth Porges is a New York-based writer and editor, and the creator of Cloth for iOS. You can follow him on Twitter at @sethporges.
The auto industry’s philosophy toward fighting distracted driving, summed up: “If it’s on the dash, it must be safe.”
Car designers seem to think just about any user interface -- no matter how archaic, frustrating, baffling, byzantine or confusing it is -- can be touted as a distraction-fighting feature, as long as it’s shoved onto the dashboard.
Of course, this folly is obvious to anybody who has slid into the front seat of a new car in recent years. In-car navigation systems? Inexplicably more difficult to use than a five-year-old Garmin or TomTom stand-alone device. Satellite radio? Awesome, if you can figure out how to surf through the stations (this is seriously a problem on a shockingly high number of new cars, which seem to do all they can to hide the ability to scroll between stations that aren’t set as “favorites”).
Let’s just be blunt: The auto industry has a lot to learn about creating a decent user interface. At best, dash-based UIs are unintuitive and frustrating. At worst, they are flat-out dangerous. To make things worse, there is also almost no consistency between manufacturers or, often, different models from the same manufacturer. Don’t even think of sidling into the front seat of your friend’s car and easily inputting directions or changing the Sirius station -- these babies have serious learning curves.
The most hands-in-the-air frustrating part of all: Car infotainment systems seem increasingly intent on forcing any external gadgets to operate through their built-in control systems. A good thing: More and more cars now come with a jack for plugging in an iPhone or iPod. A bad thing: Once you plug in your iDevice, you usually lose the ability to control it, except through the car’s archaic interface.
When plugged in, your iPod’s clickwheel or touchscreen are dead to you. Instead, a task as simple as changing the track requires digging through a file hierarchy that could easily be confused as a relic of the DOS days. (I’m not even kidding: When you plug an iPhone into many new cars, they require you to navigate through the sort of layered file folder system that we thought we had done away with a decade ago).
The obvious reason for hijacking the controls: Car manufacturers don’t want you staring down at your gadget when your eyes should be on the road. I agree. You shouldn’t stare down at a gadget. But you also shouldn’t have to flip through an awful dash-based UI.
Apple devices have the best user interfaces in the world (which raises another question: Why can’t the auto industry just rip off Apple like everybody else?). And for the millions of users who live with these things in their pockets, flipping through the controls is basically built into their muscle memory. They can do it blind. So I gotta ask: What’s worse, a quick glance down at an iPhone, or an extended stare at a frustrating dash-based infotainment system? (Yes, some cars have 3.5mm jacks for piping the audio directly into the speakers, and a few even create a vague simulacrum of the Apple interface when you jack in your iPhone, but that really doesn’t make any of this acceptable.)
Where should cars display navigation and car audio information? The one place your eyes should be while driving: the windshield. I’ve recently test-driven a number of new cars, such as the Audi A7 and the Lexus GS 350 F Sport, and in a delightfully subtle way, they display info such as your next turn or current radio station within your line of sight by reflecting it -- see-through, augmented reality-style -- over the bottom of the windshield.
Yes, these heads-up display systems still need some refinement in the UI department, but this feature works beautifully, and it really does do an amazing job of keeping your eyes on the road. So my plea to car manufacturers: Instead of creating ever more distracting and cluttered dashboard UIs, just focus on giving us just the basics on our windshield. You could even find that it saves some lives.