Designing for Everyone
February 20, 2014Wired had a piece today about a new car touchscreen design.
It’s extremely pretty. A pretty design and an example of how a modern touchscreen user interface could look. But the designer, Matthaeus Krenn, cites the biggest issue:
“There are a lot of areas where things could be improved, and yes, educating the user about the capabilities of the system is an important one that I did not spend a lot of time on.”
There’s a scenario for designing for novices and a scenario for designing for experts. Car drivers, other than race or stunt car drivers, are not experts. Imagine someone getting into this car the first time. The distraction of figuring out how to change the radio is far worse than the benefits of the interface. That’s not even mentioning that the driver still needs to look down at the screen and away from the road.
It’s pretty and has some interesting interactions, but it’s not the ingenious design Wired claims.
