Eyes On The Road, Pal

Last week, while traveling for business, I ended up with a rental Hyundai Sonata. While slogging through LA freeway traffic, I adjusted the preprogrammed radio stations to my liking. I then checked to see if there were steering wheel mounted controls, so I could scan the stations and adjust volume without taking my eyes off the road.

Well, yes on one count. The Hyundai did have steering wheel mounted audio controls, but in a curious configuration:



What struck me as odd was that the volume controls were tucked away behind the main face of the steering wheel, while the station controls where on the front. I actually had to duck my head and peer behind the steering wheel to determine the placement and functions of the buttons. Once I sussed out where the buttons were located, I had to modify my grip on the steering wheel to reach them, extending my fingers out as if I was holding a phantom soda can in my left hand. This was uncomfortable and made me effectively steer one-handed.

Contrast this with the button placement on my wife's Honda minivan:



The buttons are all right up front, no neck craning or awkward peering necessary. Additionally, they can all be easily manipulated by my thumb while my left hand is in the normal '10 o'clock' steering grip position.

I can only imagine that the Hyundai designer was trying for something 'neat,' both in terms of visual presentation on the front of the wheel and in terms of functional gimmickry, trying to be different for the sake of being different. The end result is a lack of what I call contextual awareness for the controls.

If this were some trick looking iPod dock, meant to sit on a bookshelf or mantle and exude sleekness, I could forgive odd or non-standard button placement- once you learn where the buttons are, it's not that much more difficult to use it. However, the context of steering wheel mounted audio controls is completely different- not only is the user in a situation where their attention is probably more divided than usual, but they are actually impaired in their ability to perform one of the main functions of the vehicle- steering it clear of obstacles - while using the control. Taken to the absurd extreme, the Hyundai controls could actually contribute to your demise as you fumble and peer for the proper controls.

I highlight this real world example to draw a parallel with controls or input methods in online applications that similarly fail to understand the context of their use. Typically, non-context aware controls on the Web don't lead to a shower of glass shards and an airbag deployment, but they sure can put a dent in the enjoyment of your trip. You've experienced them- usually when you're undertaking some sort of task and you're stopped dead in your tracks, trying to figure out what the web page wants from you to continue.

Some common examples:

• Dropdowns to set data more easily entered as text, such as an event time in a calendar application, or worse- year of birth, with a dropdown listing years from 1945 to the present (I've seen that a few times, sadly). This is typically the result of a desire to limit the possibility for mistakes on data entry, but it shifts the burden to the user when errors could just as easily be checked and trapped in the background in many cases.

• Popups (such as calendars) that set data on the main page. Again, this strikes me as lazy programming - if you want to provide a piece of function that will take up an inordinate amount of space on the page when not being used, there's better ways to manage that than by banishing it to a popup. By moving a control function out of the flow of the page, you introduce ambiguity about what action to take next, and increase the possibility of errors.

• Unnecessarily deep drop-down menu trees. In a misguided attempt to mimic some desktop apps, I've seen web apps that offer three and four level deep dropdown menus for navigation. Typically, your mouse needs to follow an extremely narrow and precise path along those menus to prevent them from popping off and leaving you where you started. I invariably abandon the tightrope act and try and find another means to reach the subpage. In one case, I actually had to view the source of the javascript that generated the menus to pull out the URL I needed when I couldn't manage to thread the correct path.

These are just three of many similarly annoying web gadgets that fail to understand the context of most online applications: to allow you to complete a task or to obtain information as quickly and easily as possible. Forgetting, or worse, flouting that goal is what leads to high bail rates and low stickyness. Are those things worth showing off your neat Flash drag-and-drop skillz on your main site navigation? About as worth it as a car crash when you're trying to find a decent station while driving.

Driven to the future

While driving to the Albany area this past weekend, I realized the future creeps up on us a minute at a time.

I hadn't done a similar drive since around 1989, when I navigated my 1973 Karmann Ghia up the thruway to visit a friend at RPI in Troy, NY. That vehicle was essentially a compact box of pressed metal, folded around a clattering air-cooled engine designed in the 1930s. The dashboard instruments consisted of a speedometer, fuel gauge, and a broken clock. The combo tape-deck/radio I had installed seemed terribly modern in the middle of the terribly retro fake alligator skin dash covering I had also inflicted on the car. The passenger seat held a massive road atlas, which I would study at frigid rest stops in a futile attempt to decipher the tangle of intersecting highways in the state capital area. If I failed, I would have to find a working pay phone at a rest stop and hope I had enough change left over from the tolls to call my friend, or at least hope he was home to accept a collect call.

18 years down the line I flipped the ignition on my rented Ford Edge, waited a moment while both the navigation system and the radio acquired two separate satellite networks. I plugged in my iPod, itself about the size of the cassette tapes of yore, yet holding about 20 days worth of music vs. 90 minutes. Cruising up the Thruway in comparative silence, I idly flipped through the onboard trip computer display that calculated my momentary gas mileage and 'distance to empty.' The GPS dutifully announced upcoming turns, merges and road names, and provided me with a countdown to an estimated arrival time. Nestled in the cupholder, my Blackberry plucked incoming emails from roadside cellular towers. Toll plazas silently charged my EZ-Pass as I cruised through them and their empty booths, a relic of when they harbored a human dipped into the stream of traffic to shave quarters and nickels from passing travelers.

The act- driving solo a few hundred miles up the Thruway- was identical, but just about every aspect of the trip has been transformed in ways that are now startlingly mundane. The temptation when predicting the future is to bird dog the sensational- "The car will drive itself! It will be powered by discarded banana peels!" We tend not to think about the quiet innovations that will flow in around those infrequent revolutions, and nestle themselves unnoticed in our lives until they are suddenly indispensable. Sure, I could drive to Albany and back without a satellite guided GPS system, but why would I if I have such a device? There's no equivalent fun for me in "going paper," as there might be in driving a manual transmission vehicle rather than an automatic. Flipping through a tattered road atlas on a freezing night holds no special nostalgia- I gleefully relegate that memory to the fading past.

Ten years from now, will I find it odd that I couldn't, with some strategic keywords and gestures, edit together a three minute video journal of my travels compiled from the cloud of ubiquitous video cameras along the route? Will I curse my rental for not having warned me that up ahead the driver of the Expedition was likely to drift into my lane because his eyelid blinking pattern had slowed to dangerously drowsy levels? Will I look back in horror at the barbarity of having to actually check my email to find out my wife, home with the baby, had taken ill, and that the System hadn't realized the urgency of the message and surreptitiously flashed it across the far wall of the conference room I occupied that day?

Regardless of the magical technology that may envelop us further in the coming years, I am fairly certain one element- me- will remain comfortably consistent. All the king's satellites and all the king's microprocessors still couldn't prevent me from missing my turn into the rental return lot. I was otherwise occupied, fumbling with the radio to extinguish 2Live Crew's embarrassingly blaring 'Me So Horny' before I pulled into the return line. I can only hope that the radios of the future will contain a taste subroutine that drives them to discreetly mute themselves rather than betray my guilty pleasures to the outside world.