Dashboards are the most flexible interaction centers of the interior. Frequently used controls or those critical to safety are of particular importance. The controls that are accessible to the driver while driving should be unobscured, easy to manipulate, usable by any person, functional, and intuitive.

"Intuitive" is a tough buzz word to pin down. It is important for a person to "not have to think" when using a function while driving. Characteristics that make dashboards intuitive are (1) the time to learn the control, (2) comprehension to every driver and (3) exceptional clarity for critical functions. Let's look not at what intuition is, but rather at what intuition is not:

This dashboard uses a type of button-press arbitrarily. This heater and stereo illustrate a problem with mapping, or natural relationship inferred between direction and function. These toggle style buttons map well for functions that operate up one way and down the other, such as the seek and temperature buttons. However, this logic is obviously lost on the AC/recirculate, and eject/mode buttons.

 

  

This dashboard offers few tactile cues, and those it does offer have no logical position. The symmetry of this dashboard may appear attractive, but a problem exists because the functions are not symmetrical. Except for the heat and fan control, the functions are arbitrarily positioned and require the driver to reach far out of his way to turn on certain controls that could have just as easily and logically been placed on the driver's side.

Also, note the icon on the far left middle button. I have no idea what it does.

This dashboard sacrifices mapping and tactile cues for the "style" of circles. No matter what you want to do, a circle does it. Circular controls are great for twisting. Thus, functions that are continuous (tuning and volume, in this example) are sensible. However, the designer used circles for nearly everything. This removes tactile differentiation and increases the number of times the driver has to directly read the label of the controls.

Above are examples of control overload. More buttons do not necessarily increase functionality.

There is a point where a person cannot possibly handle all of the buttons without pulling over to the side of the road. This should not need to happen to change the radio station.
Toggle switches are a poor choice. There is a reason toggle switches are not common on the lower dashboard. These switches needed vertical rails to prevent accidental breakage and unintentional operation. A simple toggle button would have taken up less space, cost less, been less prone to damage, and been easier to manipulate. To add to the poor design, the outside switches are window switches (see next example).
Unusable placement of switches: The power window controls should be easily accessible to the driver. Here, they are not. A common task is unrolling all windows or making sure all are rolled up. This setup restricts the driver to manipulating only one switch at a time, thus making this task much more difficult. Also worthy of note is that the "child lock switch" is easily accessible to everyone in the car. If you can reach the controls, you can reach the lock switch!

This dashboard was probably the worst design we saw. The mapping is incredibly arbitrary (check out the top row of buttons). Text labels are either nonexistent or confusing. The flaws are from a severe lack of task-oriented design.

Consider the task of turning the heater on. This dashboard hides the controls, thus making a simple and standardized task into a difficult and nonstandard task. One needs to navigate menus through those little LCD screens. Imagine trying to figure it out while driving!

This is much, much less intuitive than a dial for a fan and a dial for temperature.

Simple and functional: This heater setup is very clear and intuitive. Note that the "either-or" option is on a rocker switch but the others are kept single. The dials are easy to manipulate and don't need text labels.
The future could be difficult: This concept car flaunted an "all and only button dashboard" design. Even the stick is gone. Although this was only a concept interior, it is disturbing to think that (1) the designer would have so little usability training, and (2) his boss approved it.

Page 4: LCD Dashboards ...

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