VW's Unpressable Trunk Button

My wife recently had a Volkswagen Jetta as a rental car, complete with switchblade key/clicker as shown here. She was frustrated, however, that the trunk button didn't seem to work: lock and unlock worked fine, but pressing the trunk button yielded nothing. After a while, we realized that one button had to be pressed for about a second before it actually popped the trunk - and that this isn't a bug, it's a feature! The trunk button is something you don't want to accidentally hit, because fixing it requires going back to the car and manually shutting the trunk. The other two buttons, if accidentally pressed, can be fixed with just another button press! So, they designed the trunk button to be just a little more unpressable (eh? eh?), to save users from themselves. Heck, Apple did the same thing with the capslock button. The only problem is that these are design features intended for experienced users - hence the confusion for the casual (rental) user. It just speaks to design as a constant balancing act!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I never knew of that feature or the general approach to make certain functions harder to activate by applying a short delay. Thanks for that!

I wanted to try out if it is true for Ubuntu as well but then remembered that there is an option to deactivate Caps Lock completely. ;)