Baffling Controls and Useless Metaphors
I had the misfortune of driving a Vauxhall Zafira last week. I say misfortune because it just isn’t a particularly good car (read some owners reviews, I found it unstable at motorway speeds, plasticky inside and very hard work to get up to speed. Not awful, but there’s MUCH better out there.) and I didn’t get to choose it as it was sent by the hire company. Aside from it’s other failures, it would appear that Vauxhall/Opel just haven’t given any thought to usability.
Take, for example, the image to the right (click to enlarge). There are three methods of controlling something with hugely cryptic labels, a wheel and two buttons. Can anyone tell me what these actually do? The wheel controller looks like it moves something, in an arc, from left to right. The top button looks like it makes some sort of box explode while the bottom box looks as if it causes another box to grow wheels.
I’m all for using metaphors to improve usability, but in this case they just haven’t been thought through. We’re used to arrows indicating that radio stations will be cycled through, and triangles indicating that volume will be adjusted, but these buttons don’t exhibit the same level of logic (or historic use).
I’ve driven a number of Vauxhalls as hire cars over the past few years and have found the usability of the controls to be universally awful. In addition to the controls on the steering wheel, you’ll also notice some oddities when using the radio, particularly when trying to manually tune a radio station. It seems to switch, for no apparent reason, between scanning for stations and manually incrementing the frequency. The indicators also behave in a strange way. Pushing them up switches them on, pushing them down just changes direction. You have to rely on the car knowing when to turn them off, which it isn’t very good at.
It’s been suggested by someone else who drives a Zafira occasionally that these buttons have something to do with the optional phone integration. If this is the case, and I honestly don’t know, then I cannot understand why they avoided the normal phone metaphors, such as an icon that actually resembles a phone. And for what it’s worth, out of the numerous people I know who have driven new Vauxhalls, every single one of them have looked down at the buttons and wondered what they do. Surely if Vauxhall had bothered to test the interior controls for usability, they would have picked up on this. And while this may not be a big issue when deciding whether or not to buy a Vauxhall, it does leave a bad impression. The general consensus is, if they can’t get this right, what else are the going to fail at…
Tags: Automotive, Hardware, Metaphors, Usability