If you buy a brand new car in these days, you would expect that not only the exterior is tuned to address your senses but also the way you interact with the media system. But that obviously is a fallacy.
Tulio Jarocki, who is a Design Student from Boston, looks at UI’s of various cars manufactures including premium automobiles such as BMW, Land Rover or Audi and comes to an astonishing conclusion: There is no up-to-date user interface out there!
Most of the car builders seem to be stuck in the past and produce interfaces which either look awkwardly outdated, not really cared for or completely overdesigned, with so many icons and information on the screen, making it hard for drivers to do two things at the same time: drive and interact with the media system.
BMW goes a new way and introduces a software that is controlled by a rotary dial on the central console. And in fact, this seems to work much better in terms of multitasking. It has advantages to interact with the media system from a joystick as opposed to use a touch screen.
But in practice, the interaction seems to be far from being perfect due to its cumbersomeness and complexity. It simply tries to cover too many features at the same time.
Recently, Apple released its new CarPlay application which drew a lot of attention to car information and communication systems.
It is not unlikely that the apple approach introduces a shift to more pleasant car infotainment dashboards. Still, the bottom line is that most of today’s user interfaces for car infotainment systems are “stuck in the past”.
Even if they are neatly designed, most systems lack a good user experience. The main reason for this is information overload: The user is confronted with too many icons and too much information while still trying to safely drive the car.
There is a strong parallel which can be observed for IT monitoring systems. Many of those dashboards also lack of a neat and smart user interface. Instead of displaying information which can immediately be understood, they tend to be designed rather complex. It’s time to invest some research in it and come up with better solutions.
Credits
Image 1: wikipedia
Image 2: flickr
Image 3: flickr
Image 4: flickr






