The dashboard that monitors what the driver is doing, not the machine.
Ok, so I admit that I have a tendency to overvalue the impact of my own profession. I believe Malcom McCullough when he says that interaction design is likely to be one of the great liberal arts of the 21st century. The great American novel, when it finally arrives, will be planned in Omnigraffle. And the fact that most of us deploy our tradecraft in the service of streamlining the movie rental process, selling sunglasses or laminate flooring, facilitating the sharing of snapshots and how-to articles on pumpkin carving does not diminish our greatness. In fact, in my world, interaction designers are likely to be key players in all forms of meaningful societal change from here on in. (Just try and tell me that Obama’s website wasn’t pivotal in his election!) But what role does I.D. have in making the planet greener? Even I struggled with that one.
For industrial designers, who work with physical products that consume materials both in their manufacture and their ongoing usage, the links to sustainable design principles are clear. But for information product designers whose work is consumed primarily on screens, a claim to designing ’sustainably’ often feels like a stretch. What is being conserved – pixels? CPU cycles? Yet recently I am learning that I need not feel that way. It turns out there are many designers who leverage interactivity to directly make the world a more livable place – not only by raising awareness of sustainable principles but by directly affecting the way people use and think about their environment on a day-to-day basis. On Nov. 12, while hosting a panel discussion on sustainability and interaction design for NYCUPA, I met Ted Booth – Director of Interaction Design at Smart Design. Smart collaborated with IDEO in researching and designing the SmartGuage with EcoGuide for client, Ford – a true example of the unique power of interaction design to change human behavior.
The 2010 Ford Fusion is one of the first models to ship with the new SmartGuage desing in place.
The Ford SmartGuage with EcoGuide is an innovative instrument cluster (a reinterpreted automobile dashboard if you will) for a new line of Ford hybrid cars. IDEO did the user research, at the heart of which was an ethnographic look at the world of hybrid owners – including the cult-like “Hypermilers” who make a fetish out of squeezing every last drop of fuel efficiency out of their machines. Smart did the design work itself. The 2010 Ford Fusion is among the first models to hit the market with the new dashboard in place and immediately garnered considerable press and recognition for the novel philosophy behind it’s design (see further reading links at the end of this post.) The instrument panel design is purely digital, essentially one integrated monitor built into the car’s dash. Being screen-based enables some interesting affordances that are perfect for a dual-engine automobile, for instance truly modal displays. The tachometer toggles into “EV mode” when the electric motor is running, which makes sense given that electric motors don’t speak the language of “RPM’s,” and being modal allows the two gauges to share the same piece of real estate in the display. The dash even has a tutorial mode that shows descriptive help text next to each type of instrumentation, seriously threatening the future existence of 10th grade drivers ed teachers.
A modal tachometer displays in typical RPM mode when the combustion engine is running, then toggles into a differently scaled "EV" mode when the electric motor is running.
What’s most profoundly innovative about the SmartGuage design is that it turns the traditional role of a car’s driver interface exactly on it’s head. “A guiding principle was to give the driver feedback about their driving,” Booth told me in the pre-interview for our panel discussion. “Up to now, car dashboards have communicated information about what the machine is doing, not the driver.” The reason behind the shift in emphasis is a simple business problem. Many hybrid purchasers, who are socio-politically predisposed to choosing such cars for their green benefits, are unhappy customers. They just aren’t getting the increased fuel mileage they hoped for. Some aren’t getting anything near the optimal mileage recorded by the test drivers and car reviewers. It turns out a lot of this has to do with the way one drives a hybrid.
The Prius dashboard shows how much energy is recaptured by braking, but the display reinforces a misperception that braking harder is better.
How hard one brakes, for instance, is a key variable. Hybrids, as many know, recharge their batteries through the principle of regenerative braking – a process of recapturing the kinetic energy generated by braking and storing it for later use rather than dissipating it in the form of heat. The energy can be stored mechanically in the form of compressed air or a flywheel (as the high end KERS systems in Formula One racing cars do), or electrically in a capacitor or battery (as regular consumer hybrids do). It is standard procedure in a hybrid dashboard to inform the driver about how much power has been regenerated. But according to Booth, the existing instrument design gave drivers a mistaken perception about how to brake in order to maximize that number. “Existing gauges show a spike of energy when a driver brakes,” he said, “which actually makes drivers think they should wait until the last minute to brake so they can brake harder and increase the amplitude of the spike. In fact, it’s the opposite… slow steady braking delivers more of a charge, so we factored this into our design.”
It’s one thing to communicate to the driver a complex set of information about their driving and quite another to do that in a way that they can process – especially while trying to keep their eyes on the road! The Smart design team did a couple of novel things here with the design. The most famous is the use of a simple metaphor to give the driver an almost game-like sense of optimizing their driving performance – the “efficiency leaves.” Initially worried that the leaves metaphor was going to be skewered by the car reviewers, it turned out to be exactly the opposite.
The hardest thing was to process all the inputs that affect fuel economy and feed them into a display in a way that a driver can process. We came up with the metaphor of leaves… drivers earn leaves as they conserve fuel. – Ted Booth, Smart Design
Smart Guage uses bold visual and information design to create highly "glanceable" instruments.
The team also focused on a bold, clear information design that embraced the limitation of “look-away” time – which implies that drivers have less then a second to safely take something in before returning their eyes to the road. The fuel gauge, for instance, abandons the traditional needle design for a boldly rendered bar-graph that looks at first glance like amber liquid. The leaves themselves represent an easily glanced at indication of driving success, but can be toggled into a more detailed mode showing feedback in the form of hard numbers.
Few examples better illustrate the centrality of the UX trade – and the potential opportunity to affect change for the better in places we never thought of- than this reinvention of the car dashboard. These are heady, exciting times to be in the business of designing screens.
Further Reading:
Ford’s SmartGauge Improves Fuel Efficiency Through Better Instrument Design Fast Company
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