A Cold Day in an SUV
For three years, I owned a 2013 Lincoln MKX. I wanted something that wouldn't have quite the tendency to slide off the road that my rear-wheel drive roadster has and, since I could lease it, I figured it would be a good time to try out a larger vehicle. Also, since it was a lease, what better time to try out all the neat features that so many cars come with? Things like built in nav system, heated steering wheel, bluetooth integration for my phone - the works. So, I got it fully loaded. And, being a huge nerd, I was a bit excited at all the features. Sadly, the excitement evaporated quickly.
What does a car have to do with software testing? It's all about design. So many things seem like a good idea at first and, indeed, they are good ideas. But, unless someone takes the time to really understand what it's like to be around that feature every day, conveniences can quickly become annoyances. Love can turn to hate. Desire to disdain. Excitement to petulance. Coke into Pepsi. Alright, maybe not that last one.
So, let me say that things with the MKX went well for about a week. Then I started to notice things. One of the first features built into this particular model is that, when you turn the car off, the seat moves back and the steering wheel moves up. Then, when you turn the car back on, the seat moves forward and the steering wheel moves back down. This is supposed to make it easier to get in and out of your car. As you're about to hit the road again, the car should remember your settings and everything will move back into place. It's a cool idea. However, imperceptibly, every time the car started back up, the steering wheel didn't move back to the same place. It was always a little higher than it was the last time I used it. In fact, if you didn't adjust the steering wheel each time, it would drift away from you until the steering wheel ended up at in the highest position and stayed there as you turned the car on and off. What was a small annoyance when starting the car led me to turn the entire feature off.
Then there's the touch screen. First off, the screen is pressure sensitive instead of capacitive. This means that, while you can use a gloved hand or a stick or a shoe or whatever's handy to work with the screen, it also means that it is somewhat non-responsive. There's a slight delay when pressing any button. Probably not annoying unless you've used a smartphone in the last 10 years and know what a good responsive screen should feel like.
But, then there's the little issue of not supporting multi-touch. On the climate-control area of the screen, you have buttons to turn on the seat heater, seat AC, and steering wheel heater. I'll grant you, the steering wheel heater was kind of amazing. Moreover, on a cold day, you're probably going to want the seat heater and the steering wheel heater both going. So, one day, I tried to push both at the same time. One would hope that they would both spring to life warming my frosty hands, bum, and heart all in one go. At a minimum, I would expect that it would ignore one of the touch inputs and only turn one item on. Alas, no, the screen decided that the touch should be interpreted in the middle of my two presses proceeding to engage the seat AC in the already freezing cold weather. This is the exact opposite of what I want.
You might be thinking, "oh, yes, that sounds bad - but, aren't you glad that they made the screen pressure sensitive so that you could use it with gloved hands?" See, that does sound like good reasoning. Why then, dear reader, why for the love of all decent design, did they make the controls below the touch screen capacitive? That's right; the controls built into the dash to turn on the rear defrost, control the fan, the stereo volume, and several other controls are not actual buttons, but little raised bumps on the dash that respond to a capacitive touch. So, the most common things you would want to do in the car cannot be done with gloves on.
One final point on the controls below the screen. I don't know about most people, but those tend to be the controls that I need to access while I'm driving. Feeling cold? Turn the heat up a bit. Too much air? Turn the fan down a bit. Things like that. In most cars, these controls are laid out with ample space between them and you can usually feel your way to the correct control while keeping your eyes firmly on the road like a responsible person. In the MKX, should you try and feel your way to the control you want, you will have turned on every single function of the car that you happened to brush while you were trying to find the radio volume.
I could go on about some of the finer points of design that were missed in the MKX - it handled like a giant sponge, the backup sensor liked to freak out if there was an offensive twig 100 feet away, the seat took forever to heat up in the winter - but, I hope my message is clear. So many of these points could have been identified if the people who designed it would have used the feature long enough.
Use your software. Use it regularly and under a variety of conditions. Make sure your good ideas don't turn convenience into annoyance.
What does a car have to do with software testing? It's all about design. So many things seem like a good idea at first and, indeed, they are good ideas. But, unless someone takes the time to really understand what it's like to be around that feature every day, conveniences can quickly become annoyances. Love can turn to hate. Desire to disdain. Excitement to petulance. Coke into Pepsi. Alright, maybe not that last one.
So, let me say that things with the MKX went well for about a week. Then I started to notice things. One of the first features built into this particular model is that, when you turn the car off, the seat moves back and the steering wheel moves up. Then, when you turn the car back on, the seat moves forward and the steering wheel moves back down. This is supposed to make it easier to get in and out of your car. As you're about to hit the road again, the car should remember your settings and everything will move back into place. It's a cool idea. However, imperceptibly, every time the car started back up, the steering wheel didn't move back to the same place. It was always a little higher than it was the last time I used it. In fact, if you didn't adjust the steering wheel each time, it would drift away from you until the steering wheel ended up at in the highest position and stayed there as you turned the car on and off. What was a small annoyance when starting the car led me to turn the entire feature off.
Then there's the touch screen. First off, the screen is pressure sensitive instead of capacitive. This means that, while you can use a gloved hand or a stick or a shoe or whatever's handy to work with the screen, it also means that it is somewhat non-responsive. There's a slight delay when pressing any button. Probably not annoying unless you've used a smartphone in the last 10 years and know what a good responsive screen should feel like.
But, then there's the little issue of not supporting multi-touch. On the climate-control area of the screen, you have buttons to turn on the seat heater, seat AC, and steering wheel heater. I'll grant you, the steering wheel heater was kind of amazing. Moreover, on a cold day, you're probably going to want the seat heater and the steering wheel heater both going. So, one day, I tried to push both at the same time. One would hope that they would both spring to life warming my frosty hands, bum, and heart all in one go. At a minimum, I would expect that it would ignore one of the touch inputs and only turn one item on. Alas, no, the screen decided that the touch should be interpreted in the middle of my two presses proceeding to engage the seat AC in the already freezing cold weather. This is the exact opposite of what I want.
You might be thinking, "oh, yes, that sounds bad - but, aren't you glad that they made the screen pressure sensitive so that you could use it with gloved hands?" See, that does sound like good reasoning. Why then, dear reader, why for the love of all decent design, did they make the controls below the touch screen capacitive? That's right; the controls built into the dash to turn on the rear defrost, control the fan, the stereo volume, and several other controls are not actual buttons, but little raised bumps on the dash that respond to a capacitive touch. So, the most common things you would want to do in the car cannot be done with gloves on.
One final point on the controls below the screen. I don't know about most people, but those tend to be the controls that I need to access while I'm driving. Feeling cold? Turn the heat up a bit. Too much air? Turn the fan down a bit. Things like that. In most cars, these controls are laid out with ample space between them and you can usually feel your way to the correct control while keeping your eyes firmly on the road like a responsible person. In the MKX, should you try and feel your way to the control you want, you will have turned on every single function of the car that you happened to brush while you were trying to find the radio volume.
I could go on about some of the finer points of design that were missed in the MKX - it handled like a giant sponge, the backup sensor liked to freak out if there was an offensive twig 100 feet away, the seat took forever to heat up in the winter - but, I hope my message is clear. So many of these points could have been identified if the people who designed it would have used the feature long enough.
Use your software. Use it regularly and under a variety of conditions. Make sure your good ideas don't turn convenience into annoyance.
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