Smart Keys and Unpressable Buttons

I'll admit it: I love my minivan. As long as it's considered for the function of transportation instead of the excitement of driving, there's nothing it can't do. It doesn't skimp on conveniences either, which include smart keys and power sliding doors. However, there's a literally unpressable button in that mix. The idea of a smart key is that it can be in a pocket or bag, and you never have to touch it. To allow you to lock the car without having to find the key, there are "lock" buttons on the outside door handles. The problem is that you can't use the lock buttons until all the doors are closed - so the convenient-but-slow sliding doors force me to wait by the car so I can press the lock button after they close. A simple change seems feasible, where the car could beep to acknowledge the lock button with the doors open, then double-beep when the doors close and successfully execute the lock command. It'd save a few seconds every time, often many times per day, and that adds up. Making buttons more pressable can make smart keys smarter!

The Lyft/Uber Option We Really Want

Make it happen. I know a lot of people (myself included) who'd pay the premium.

Actibump, a speed bump only for speeders

Speed bumps have a certain brute-force, undeniable effectiveness: you'd better slow down, or you car (and your butt) will be very unhappy. One problem is that this affects those obeying the speed limit as well as speeders; everyone gets a compromised ride experience. Swedish firm Edeva has designed a solution: Actibump, a speed-dependent speed bump. Radar detects the speed of an oncoming vehicle and adjusts the bump accordingly, and if you're below the speed limit, there's no bump at all. There are certainly tradeoffs here: the unit could break down (which traditional speed bumps won't do); there's the issue of educating the driving public about those "bump if speeding" signs. But if everything goes smoothly, it could result in everyone going more smoothly, too.
[via Core77]

Third Brake Light, Tested & Confirmed

Jalopnik recently wrote about the surprisingly structured, rational addition of the third brake light that's been mandatory since 1986. Psychologist John Voevodsky came up with the idea for a third light that's only on when braking, as opposed to tail lights which are always on at night and just brighten when braking. From there it was a well-controlled scientific experiment, randomly applying the feature to taxis and comparing accident rates. The results: "The light prevented 5.4 collisions, 1.02 cab driver injuries, and $643 of taxicab damage per million miles." Now that's good design!
[via Jalopnik]

GPS Uses Kids' Voices in School Areas

Driving is often such a monotonous activity that it becomes mindless, and these zombified drivers aren't the best at looking out for hazardous situations. So, Swedish agency If Insurance designed a way to snap drivers out of their glazed-over state of mind: when near a school, GPS navigation instructions are spoken in childrens' voices. It's a great way to use an unexpected change, and the instinctual response of adults to the voice of a child, to mind-hack drivers into a state of awareness. As I've always said, little things like this can add up to make big differences!
[via Gizmodo]

Parking Signs: So much room for improvement...

Parking signs are a mess: they blurt out a verbose, sequential list of complex rules which tend to overlap, cancel out, and generally become useless jumbles in the brains of drivers. Thankfully, design is coming to the rescue: Nikki Sylianteng has an ongoing project at To Park or Not to Park, where she's iteratively refining her grid-based design. Instead of having to solve a multivariable logic problem, you can look up the day and time to get a quick read on whether you can park and for how long. A little less road rage ("parking rage?") would certainly make the world a better place!
[via Gizmodo]

Unintended Consequences: Pedestrian Countdown Timers

Those nifty countdown timers on most modern crossing lights certainly seem convenient for pedestrians: knowing how much time you have can help you hustle or let you relax your pace across an intersection. However, it turns out that they're actually increasing the number of accidents. Motorists surreptitiously use them to enable more second-shaving aggressive driving. One solution offered by researchers is to replace visible timers with audio-only timers, which pedestrians can hear but most drivers can't. A little less information just might make drivers a little less dangerous!
[via Gizmodo, photo credit Ed Yourdon]

Sneckdowns: Revealing unused road space...

A worthy addition to your design vocabulary and a word that's just fun to say, a "sneckdown" is an area of snow that remains on a road because cars rarely cross that area. It's handy for urban design because it shows, clearly and at no cost, which areas of road could be put to other use. Park(ing) Day proponents should certainly be interested in more permanent parking-spot mini-parks; opportunities could also exist for recycling receptacles, info kiosks, even tiny-scale solar or wind power plants. Rarely does real-world usage track itself so elegantly - all that remains is to put that info to good use!
[via Gizmodo, Streetsblog, BBC News; photo credit @nelszzp]

Design Placebo: Seatbelt Knife

The Gerber Daily Carry Hook Knife is designed to save lives, but it goes about it in a sneaky way. It's marketed as a device that "can be used to quickly cut yourself out of a piece of clothing, seatbelt or other safety strap, should you ever get stuck in a tight spot." And, okay, that's true - but the real effect is to make carriers feel comfortable wearing seatbelts in the first place, without worrying about being trapped later. So it really saves lives by convincing more people to fasten their seatbelts - not by cutting anyone out of them!
[via Core77]

What Matters in Car Design

As a consumer product, cars really have it all: engineered performance, fashionable styling, a sense of identity, tons of usability considerations, along with safety and environmental balances.  The question is which of these things each consumer prioritizes in their purchase decisions - and which contribute to real satisfaction.  Don Norman argues that car reviewers are "stuck in the past", obsessed with performance driving and visual styling, and I agree - those two aspects are vastly over-emphasized, compared to how they'll serve the driver in everyday use.  Who cares if your car does 0-60 in 5 seconds, if you're never going to race it?  It's more likely that the usability of the more mundane features, or less sexy attributes like reliability and fuel economy, will contribute to long-term satisfaction.  Fortunately, these aren't entirely overlooked - Hipstomp writes at Core77 that these things are being quietly emphasized in car design.  "Quietly" because it's just not culturally preferred to buy a car for these reasons - I've taken some flack for my next car being a minivan - but the designers know that drivers will be glad they did in the long term, and hopefully come back for more!

Haptic Steering Wheel for GPS Cues

If you're getting sick of your GPS's bossy robo-voice and mispronunciation of road names, hope is on the horizon!  AT&T Labs are trying out another way you can get your turn cues: through haptic vibrations in the steering wheel itself.  Clockwise vibrations indicate a right turn, counterclockwise mean a left turn, and early results have been good - studies show that there's less "inattentiveness" with this method than with the usual visual and audio GPS cues.  I'm a fan of keeping a tight loop between cues and actions - if you need to take action with your hands (turning the wheel), then why not provide the signal to... your hands?  On the other hand (so to speak), road vibrations may provide background noise that would make it difficult to be sure you're getting a cue.  Even so, it's a design well worth exploring.
[via Technology Review & Gizmodo]

Left- and Right-Hand Sensing

This kind of thing must happen hundreds of times a day: a driver wants his passenger to enter a new destination in the car's GPS, but can't because that function is blocked while the car is in motion.  It's a safety feature designed to keep the driver from distraction, but it overshoots and blocks the passenger from helping.  This situation calls for a new sensor, something that's capable of distinguishing a passenger's interaction from a driver's interaction - and Cirque's new sensor that can tell which hand you're using seems like the right (or left?) way to go.  If it's the left hand being used on the center dashboard, that's the passenger - unless the driver is doing some crazy contortions, of course.  A sensor like this would be useful for the most part, although (like many sensors) probably annoying when it reads things wrong.  But still, the more sensors the better, so the whole system can see what's really going on, and work as it's designed.

It's (Not Really) Ready...

This one comes from my lovely wife Jessica, whose eagle-eyes noticed some contradictory fine print in an ad for the new Toyota Camry.  The tagline is "It's Ready. Are You?"  The fine print?  "Prototype shown."  Sooo, is it ready or not...?
[Thanks Jess!]

Ford's Easy Fuel System - Goodbye, gascaps!

Not being a Ford driver myself, this one has completely gone under my radar until now - but apparently, since 2008, Ford cars have had no gas cap! Their Easy Fuel System seems like it has all kinds of things going for it: the fueling process is quicker and easier with two fewer steps, there's no possibility of putting the cap on incorrectly (which makes the system environmentally better), and the system "rejects" incorrect diesel pumps. This is one of those cases where engineering rules, and the user experience comes in second - but Ford's found a way to make it better on all counts. I can only assume that other auto makers can't use this because it's patented like crazy - but in that case, Ford should be shouting from mountaintops about this unique feature! The fact that I haven't heard of a great design feature until now sounds like a bit of a marketing failure...

[via Core77]

HitchSafe - Convenient outside-of-car storage...

It may smack of infomercial tackiness, but the HitchSafe actually seems like a pretty slick idea. A combination lock discreetly and securely holds a small stash inside your trailer hitch - a spare key, cash or credit card, whatever you need. Beats the heck out of magnetic hide-a-key slapped on the undercarriage! It's something I might not be ashamed to use - if I ever have a vehicle with a trailer hitch, that is...

[via Lifehacker]

Fake "Recycling" Box Conceals Valuables

In the same disguise-it-as-worthless category as the uglified bike and sandwich mold camouflage bags, this trick from Kevin Waits at Wisebread is simple but effective: hide valuables in your car in a fake "recycling" box, topped with cardboard and eggcrates. Is it a bit of an eyesore in a clean car? Maybe, but it's not as bad as having your stuff stolen! Let's hope not too many car breaker-inners are reading these blogs, huh?

[via Lifehacker]

Magnetic "Yellow Card" for Bike-Endandering Drivers

Bicyclists have to survive in a harrowing world: roads designed for and dominated by cars, against which they would lose in almost any accident. Designer Peter Miller realized that they need a way to notify bike-dangerous drivers of their behavior, and something better than shouting or dinging a little bell. His solution: the magnetic Yellow Card, which can be tossed by a biker onto the offending vehicle. It's quite clever, since (as the card itself points out) "it can neither damage your automobile, nor affix itself to rubber or glass and will therefore not affect your driving." It would be a whole separate issue to study the actual reactions of drivers when they get around to reading these, though - perhaps they'd be more angry than apologetic when faced with these cards instead of a face-to-face confrontation. But the concept is certainly intriguing!

[via Boing Boing & Gizmodo]

Better Brake Lights?

Sent my way by reader Mark Shervey, and designed by graphic designer Mark Cossey, here's a quick idea for progressive brake lights. (Hit the link to see the fully animated graphic, it makes a difference!) Light braking makes the lights behave as we're all used to, but heavier braking causes the brakelights to do a strobe-flashing thing to really get your attention. This makes good sense to anyone who's had someone stop extremely short in front of them - you definitely wish there'd been some warning other than the regular old brakelights! A strobe may not be the very best idea - epilepsy may be a problem - but some kind of progressive brakelight seems like a nice improvement on the norm. Get it made, Mark!

Talking Car: Good for buyers, bad for users...

Mark Hurst wrote recently on his Good Experience blog about the brief failed experiment that was the talking car. The car would verbalize status warnings like "the door is ajar" and "don't forget your keys." My grandfather actually had one of these cars for a while, and I thought his hatred of it was unique to him; "the door is ajar" was usually followed by his "go to hell!" But it turns out from Mark's account that this was a pretty common reaction. People who oohed and ahhed at the feature in the showroom came to despise it as an annoyance after a couple of weeks of ownership. It's a good case of design-for-sales, not design-for-use - and a "feature" that turned out to be a liability.

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!