Return of the two-tiered Civic dashboard

I have mentioned the two-tiered dashboard of my 2008 Civic in this blog before, and I wanted to touch on it one last time. I’ve gotten used to the dual-tiered dashboard, though I have complained about it in the past.

However, this research from Summala, Lamble & Laakso (1998) demonstrates that brake light detection is not so good when attention is focused at the speedometer and is better when focused on a display at the lower portion of the windshield. From the article’s abstract:

Perception of the lead car’s braking was measured on-road when subjects of various levels of driving experience were looking at a digital display located at the lower part of the windscreen, at the speedometer level, or in the mid-console. The brake lights of the lead car were either working normally or switched off. The results indicated that the detection of the lead car’s brake lights, in daylight, is substantially impaired when a following driver is looking at the speedometer area and brake lights do not contribute to detection at all when he/she is looking at a target in the mid-console… 

So peripheral vision is not that great for detecting brake lights when you’re looking down at your speedometer. It is pretty good, though, at the level of the lower windshield, which is where my speedometer is. So I must revise my assessment of the two-tiered Civic dashboard and say that it doesn’t seem to hurt driving performance by being digital instead of analog, and it may even assist with brake light detection. I suppose only an analysis of accident rates between the two types of speedometers will really tell which design is better, but for now, I endorse this new design.

GUI Wars: Web Browser Find Functions: Safari vs. Firefox

This is a great example of using attention research in user interface design. Standard Find functions in programs like Microsoft Word pop up a dialog box. You type what you want to find, then it highlights the word. It’s hard to find that highlighted word a lot of the time.

Firefox improves the search process by making the search box a bar that is part of the main window. Research has shown that attention often is distributed across discrete objects, and switching between objects incurs a cost (Egly, Driver & Rafal, 1994). With this layout, you don’t need to shift your attention between objects (though the search bar is all the way at the bottom):

The highlighted word is not that hard to find, but depending on where the word is, it can be difficult to do. In this case, you don’t incur an attentional shift cost from the Find window to the main browser window, but you do have to engage in costly visual search for the highlight word! Problematic.

The new version of Safari, however, fixes this incredibly well. It has the search bar right at the top, but it dims the entire page that’s not your search term and pops up and highlights in a bright yellow your search term. Luminance, motion, and color uniqueness. Talk about attention capture (Yantis & Jonides, 1984)!:

Making the Find tool part of the main window: excellent. Using animation to induce motion, brightness, and color uniqueness so that you can easily find what you were searching for? Genius.

Wednesday Funnies

The best graphs are the ones that are easily readable. It helps to play off previous knowledge, too:

Link to source (Flickr).

Election Day!

Today is Election Day here in Virginia; we are voting for new State-level senators and delegates, along with local-level politicans. I voted today in the races where I felt educated. I did not vote for the new appointee to the soil and water board.

There was one big human factors issue from today: the voting machines. I haven’t seen too many problems while waiting in line, but there is one problem that I have always seen occur. Always. Once you’re done checking things off on the ballot, there is a big red button that says “VOTE” that you have to press. It looks like this:

You’re supposed to press the button, and then you get the confirmation screen:

The problem is that many people never realize that they have to press the big red button to actually cast their vote. Election officials often have to run after someone to have them press the button. Why?

If we adopt the mindset of the software developers, I believe the thinking goes like this: We want to give people one last chance to make changes, so there should be a big button at the very end that confirms once and for all that they will cast their ballot. It should be on its own screen to emphasize the finality of it. Let’s make it red and really big so people won’t miss it!

Back to the real world: this is valid thinking! People notice salient objects. Big bright things capture attention very nicely (Tsai & Peterson, 2006), and the fact that it says “VOTE” should indicate that people should press it to vote. So why don’t people press it? The thinking probably goes like this: I’ve checked off the boxes on who I want to vote for and the other ballot issues, so I’m done. I’m at a screen that says “VOTE” which must mean that it’s ready for the next person to vote. Great, all done!
Alternate ending: I see a screen that says “VOTE”… it looks like I’m done, I don’t think I have any buttons on this screen.

So what happened? Two things.

1. The word “VOTE” on the big red button is not especially descriptive. It makes perfect sense that a new user would walk up to the screen and have to press the button to begin. Yes, there are instructions above the button, but who reads those? The button is big enough. Put the instructions on the button. Group them together on the salient object, and the instruction “PRESS HERE TO CAST YOUR BALLOT” should be informative.
2. The button is really big. Like, unusually big. The rest of the interface doesn’t have buttons that big. It is possible that people can’t even tell that it’s a button that needs pressing. It’s not a user interface widget people are used to, so they don’t know what to do with it. Therefore, they don’t do anything.

Either way, these are both small issues that could be fixed. The clearer instructions would solve both issues. I’m sure these devices have been tested by users, but they’ve also been used for the past few years. Has there been no feedback from election officials on the Big Red Button issue? A simple change may save quite a bit of trouble.

Ars Technica UI Review of Mac OS X 10.5

Ars Technica is an amazing computer enthusiast website, and they often have the best in-depth reviews of each new incarnation of Apple’s Macintosh operating system. Leopard (version 10.5) was released last Friday, and Ars covers not only new features, but new OS internals and predicts what it means for the future. Most of the review is technical, but the author (John Siracusa) hits many of the user interface points right on the head.

I won’t go into too much detail here, but the author certainly has an eye for these things. For example, his review of the new “special” folder icons (such as for Documents, Movies, and Applications) that look like this:

John Siracusa at Ars Technica writes:

When it comes to at-a-glance identification, the difference is striking. I find myself literally squinting at the Leopard special folder icons, as if I’m constantly not seeing them clearly. You can find a more rigorous examination of the new folder icons at Indie HIG (a site whose mere existence is a blot on Apple’s recent user interface record).

Poorly designed folder icons aren’t the end of the world, but it’s the context that’s so maddening. Here’s an interface element that maybe could have used some freshening up, but it was far from broken. Apple’s gone and made it worse in a way that’s obvious in seconds to anyone who’s ever given any thought to interface design. It boggles the mind. The rumor is that Jobs likes them. Great.

He doesn’t need to understand perception or contrast detection or anything related to cognition, but he knows it implicitly. It’s an example of the “obviousness” that is human factors design, yet it is definitely not obvious to everyone. Anyway, Read the review here (link goes to start of the UI review portion) - it’s worth your time.