We all have these stories, I suspect. A friend wrote this up and I'm passing it along, with his permission, anonymized.
He was buying a new car - fairly high end, significant purchase: "The choice came down to [Car A], which is an updated version of my old car, or the [Car B]. I love love loved the feel of spaciousness in [Car B], I could have used the cargo space, and the user interface with the nav/audio screen is stunning. (You get a mouse-like thing instead of the touch screen that you have in the ES and it's really quite brilliantly designed.) But it couldn't compete with the smoothness, comfort and quiet of [Car A]I want my car to feel like my living room---I mean like my NEW living room, since I replaced the couch---and [Car A] comes closest to that. So it was a close call. But here's what finally swayed me. It's a tiny thing, but when it's so close a call, the tiny things matter. That brilliant user interface in the RX has one glaring flaw. Namely: When you're using your iPod (which plugs in through the USB port in the armrest!), you can scroll through songs, albums, artists, etc, on the car's screen---but whatever your cursor is currently touching starts to play. So you can't listen to one thing while scrolling around deciding what to listen to next. As soon as you start scrolling, the song changes. Suppose I want to play a song that starts with "L", making it, oh, about song #3000 on my alphabetical list. I bring up the song menu. It shows me the first twelve songs on my list, starting with something like "A is for Alligator", and it starts playing the first of those songs. I hit the button to go to the next screen; it shows me twelve more songs and starts playing the first of those. Then on to the next screen and the next.By the time I get to my "L" song, I've listened to the first few bars of, oh, about 300 songs or so. As far as I can tell, there is no way to scroll through the list without this happening. Caveat: They lent me the car for 24 hours; I tried very hard to find a way around this and couldn't find one. Maybe if I'd had the car for 48 hours, I'd have discovered it. [Car A], being old technology, just has you plug your iPod in through an audio jack and then you operate your iPod in the usual way, using the iPod screen instead of the car's screen. That's much better." So here's a situation in which a major purchase turns on a tiny detail of user interaction. There are probably thousands and thousands of stories like this, mostly undocumented. Hope you enjoyed reading this one, --Alan ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
