So cars have on-screen UI’s now.
On our recent Christmas vacation we hired a Holden SV6 and drove it safely around for a few weeks. The power, comfort etc was fine, but the most intriguing thing to me for the duration of our use was the ‘Holden-iQ’ in dash computer.
It works well enough but if this is the direction cars are going it should really work awesomely. Especially in an age where we’re all getting smart phone savvy and expectations are going through the roof for user experience. Holden touts the feature quite highly, but the marriage between a touch screen UI and 100 years of car manufacturing isn’t exactly seamless.
Screen Resolution
Horrible. Again, we’re all carrying around ridiculously high resolution devices in our pocket. This looks like an old CRT is shoved in there. For the amount of time you’ll look at this thing it’ s a little sad. The screen is not as responsive as most people are used to, either.
Form vs Function
Needs work. We hired the car in summer, which means you need to turn the car on, blast the air conditioner and jump out before you leave the beach. The Holden-iQ system requires you wait for the logo splash screen (ugh) plays, then the system thinks for awhile, then you can start getting inputs to respond.
What makes this frustrating is the combination of hardware knobs, buttons and dials that you can press with no response from the system until it is ready. I count around 32 hardware inputs around and below the touch screen, plus 10 on the steering wheel. The screen itself can perform some but not all of the things these buttons can. Some things work straight away (media switching) but others don’t (air conditioning) with no user feedback as to why.
How many hardware buttons on an iPad?
Iconography
Is there a UI designer employed at Holden? The only icons on the whole display are ones that have been established on car dashboards for decades (hazard lights, eject, etc). There are whole buttons with labels written out in English which an icon could replace.
- Radio
- Media
- Aux
- Config
- Map
- Nav
Instead of a clean set of icons you have a mix of icons and text. Not that the text is clear enough for me to understand what the different between ‘nav’ and ‘map’ might be.
iPod Connectivity
Flawless. I have to imagine though this is in part of some sort of Quality Control to be an official iPod accessory. Having this work so well was a delight compared to Bluetooth/Aux input solutions in older cars.
Conclusion
The whole system works, it just feels like two ideas slammed together, rather than executed the best way possible. A larger, higher resolution screen would be great to see. Some of the hardware buttons could easily be removed with smarter software.
Right now there’s too many older ideas showing through. It’s hard with such a legacy of hardware UI, but as more of a premium gets put on these touch screens hopefully some really smart cars should be the result.