It is starting to become
painfully obvious that car and appliance manufacturers are going to have to
relearn the hard way some of the lessons from the world of design from the 20th
century.
For example, between the 1930’s
and 1960’s there were a number of attempts to design the perfect kitchen. The premise was simple – a specific place for
everything you had. There was a place to put the cereal box, the sugar jar, the
flour jar, the pots, the pans, the kettle, the bread and so on.
I know what you are thinking “But
that’s what I have in my kitchen now isn’t it?”
Not quite. You see, what the designers did was to find out the
dimensions of the average item in each category and design a specific storage
space just to fit that item.
What this meant was that for a
year or two the kitchen was paradise and everything fitted where it belonged.
However, things change. New appliances are invented and introduced to the
kitchen. Packaging for products change. The type of products change. Old
appliances need to be replaced and the replacement doesn’t fit in the space of
the old one.
Do you get it yet? They designed
the kitchen to match a static point of time – no allowance was given for change
and after a few years people found their perfect kitchen was annoying and
restrictive. Which is why your current kitchen has cupboards, big drawers for
pots and pans, smaller drawers for cutlery and big benchtop space. Basically
they provide storage spaces which you can put whatever you like in to suit
yourself as needed.
Another example of overdesign
would be the massive corner TV cabinets that many people bought at the end of
the cathode ray tube era and still haven’t replaced. They take up too much room
in the house and now you can get a flat screen TV that is too big for the TV
cabinet for only a couple of hundred dollars. I see educational institutions
and corporates making the same mistake again by building casing for wall
mounted screens for sizes that are no longer even available 18 months later.
Which brings us back to car and
appliance manufacturers.
Let’s start with appliances and
my favourite example which seems to resurrect itself every couple of years –
smart fridges. I am incredibly wary about having a touchscreen computer in my
fridge. What’s it going to run on -
Android? How do I update it. How do I buy Apps for it? How do I get it fixed if
it doesn’t work anymore. How do I update the software? Does the fridge work
fully without it? (as in do I still have manual controls?)
The simple answer for me is that if
you really want a touchscreen for your fridge, can somebody please invent a
fridge mount for my iPad or other tablet computer – that way I never worry
about obsolescence.
Likewise cars. Somewhere in the
last few decade the IT guys have been let loose in car design. The traditional
designers who understand the driver and their family needs very well gave a
nice looking spot on the dashboard for the screen, and somehow all adult
supervision ended at that point. BMW and a couple of the other early adopters
were infamous for how bad their systems were. The in-car systems were so
flexible and had so many options you almost needed a computer degree to turn on
your air conditioning.
I actually met a member of the
BMW interface IT team – he moved to Australia and became a pipeline welding
inspector working in remote areas in his early 30’s. Perhaps it was to escape
any potential awkward conversations with irate BMW drivers.
One of the key design features
for a car is that the driver should be able to find a knob or switch on the
dashboard by touch and from the feel of it know what function it has. For the
core car controls this should always remain the case. Having to look at,
navigate and select functions on screen is a fundamental safety hazard as the
driver takes their eyes off the screen. Even having a screen next to the
speedometer with controls on the steering wheel doesn’t improve things very
much.
Then we get to in-car GPS systems. Put
it this way, a new standalone GPS system with Bluetooth voice for your phone is
only about $100 to $200. That is a fraction of the cost of the manufacturer’s
system and allows you to put in the latest and greatest every couple of years. If
I own a car for 5 to 10 years, the last thing I want is a really old computer
system in my car that I have to interact with.
In our corporate lives we also
experience the overdesign and overcustomisation phenomenon with ERP other major
pieces of software.
My key advice would be to produce
a product that allows the customer to decide how and where to use it in their
lives. You take care of usability and functionality and leave the rest to them.
