Everyone’s getting excited about interactive technologies making their way into the automotive space. Social web features like twitter, facebook, foursquare and others have been in our cars for several years now, just on our mobile devices and not packaged as a piece of the overall dashboard experience. Product managers at all major car-manufacturing houses have been thinking about ways to bring technology of today and the future into our cars. To date, a lot of teaser videos and commercials have been showing Minority Report like heads up displays on the dash, touch screen windows and voice command interactions and some of these are starting to come on line… others are still in R&D and off in the distance. So where are we in the meantime?

Over the past several years, Onboard Touch Screen Consoles have been making their way into the market… and they’re all the rage! While the trend started in the mid 90′s with outboard GPS systems and LED media displays, there’s been a lot of momentum behind putting integrated systems into center consoles of vehicle and trying to pack it with as many features as possible.

While the gadget lover in all of us is starting to feel all warm and fuzzy, there are definitely some inherent risks. Basically, anything taking your attention off the road is bad. So it seems the “don’t talk on the phone or text and drive” sensibility is giving way to our gadget luv.

But let’s take a second and acknowledge some contextual realities. You’re in roughly 4000lbs of metal with a combustible engine moving 25-35mph in the city and 55-75mph on the highway. Does it make sense to be taking your hands off the wheel and eyes off the road? The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has taken the position that:

Some technologies are simply too distractive for most drivers. Touch-screen computers found in most Ford models used to control the radio, climate, and in-car navigation was said to be “overly complicated and distracting” according to Consumer Reports. And, some vehicles in the GM lineup offer communication tools to verbally update Facebook and Twitter pages – a feature too distractive for most drivers.

Here are some approaches to packing your car with technology and apps in a way that doesn’t interfere with your driving:

1) Interactive Apps in the Car are for the Passenger, Not the Driver




This is pretty straightforward… keep the distracting tech geared towards passengers and steer clear of putting the driver’s attention at risk.

2) You’re car is the interface… not your fingers/eyes.

This is the really innovative approach… the car and it’s native features are an extension of you. There is a lot of untapped opportunity to be explored in this concept.

Here are some other ideas worth exploring:
Take advantage of where the driver’s hands already are… the wheel. Thanks to advances in Mobile, tech and gadget users are getting used to a wide vocabulary of haptic gestures. Add text to speech and voice commands technology and you’ll really get some rich user experiences without taking your hands off the wheel or your eyes off the road.

Whatever the approach – there will be mishaps along the way. Today’s ubiquitous cup older has had a long journey from glove compartment trays and door holsters to armrests, center consoles and dash boards, the cup holder seems to be a feature the some manufactures “get” and others don’t.

The only way to continuously improve designs towards efficiency and usability is to explore opportunities, prototype, test, and tweak. Who knows this better than Donald Norman, author of Emotional Design. Donald states that Audi’s approach to the cup holder seems to “reflects the old-fashioned German automobile design culture, which proclaims that the engineer knows best, and considers studies of real people driving their vehicles irrelevant.”

We’re keeping an eye on interaction design in the automotive space, things are about to get interesting! Let us know what interactive automobile experiences you’ve had that either work or fail – we want to hear from you! Thanks for reading.

Learn how our friends at Promet are taking Cab services mobile with Green Cab.

Being a virtual company has it’s challenges – communicating, planning, collaborating, tracking, managing and delivering have many potential pitfalls.  We wanted to take a moment to highlight some products that have been helping us to drive more efficiency in our virtual structure.

In recent months, Limina has been picking up the pace in collaborating with UX personnel in the field and delivering our services.  This has been, in no small part, due to our use of collab-ware.  We’ve recently migrated our intranet, client extranets and project collaboration space to OneHub workspaces.   For the past 5 years, we’ve been  using GoToMeeting to facilitate our internal project checkpoints, along with a host of user research activities and client presentations.  And we’ve recently started using ClickTime as our user friendly time reporting product.

Other enablers we’re tinkering with in our lab include: Pidoco, iRise,and iMockups, to name a few. Add into the mix Skype, GoogleDocs, chat and mail clients and you’re well on your way!

We just thought we’d give a shout out to technology products that’ve been making deploying our user centered research and design services  not only more efficient for a decentralized UX practice, but fun and easy!  Our clients and field agents love how we’ve brought these products into our process and service delivery suite.  And we couldn’t think of any better way to say: “We <3 These Great Products!”

-Jon

We’ve been tracking this story for about a week now – trying to see where things would end up. Here’s just a brief overview an analysis, along with some interesting links on what you might have missed.

On October 5th,  2010 – GAP, inc.  quietly swapped out their logo on their website (soft launch) without warning or announcement.

On October 6th, 2010 -  UnderConsideration posted an article “Don’t Mind the Gap, or the Square” where they provided a little background on the company, the history of the logo and some initial reactions to the new logo.

Gap’s Facebook Page starts getting customer comments on the new look… and Gap responds:

Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We’ve had the same logo for 20+ years, and this is just one of the things we’re changing. We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.
— Gap’s Facebook status update

October 7th, 2010 – idsng.org posts a roll-up of reactions to the new logo and Gap’s plans to crowd-source, or not.

October 8th, 2010 -  UnderConsideration pulls together the Mother-load post “Followup: Gap Gate” – demonstrating that gap consumers, designers, bloggers and the social web weren’t going to swallow the new logo and were ready to poke fun and actually compete for the title of “I designed the new Gap logo”

The Gapify Tumblr demonstrated how asinine the design decisions were and how applying them completely oversimplify and disregarded the key brand identity in any logo.

And my personal favorite CrapLogo.Me took a more in-your-face approach to describe how they feel about the new logo by creating a Gap logo meme.

By far the most controversial of reactions (see below)  is Gap’s marketing pivot – “Let’s crowd source the logo design” which spurs into motion a $500 logo design competition by 99 Designs.  The competition rang in a healthy 4660 entries – which spanned  wide range of humorous satirical design to some legitimate attempts to resolve the company’s desire to move their brand forward.  While this competition is not officially sponsored by Gap, we’re awaiting to learn the outcome of the, now closed, competition and what 99 Designs intends to do with the winning design.  (UPDATE 10.18.10 – below)

Post-post Analysis Post: Everyone is all excited about crowd-sourcing design..  aren’t they?  Wait…  not everyone.  Crowd-sourcing has done wonders for open technology platforms like Drupal and Jquery and opened content platforms like Wikipedia,  but is it right for design?  The main complaint to the world of crowd sourced design is that it appeals to the bottom feeder in design consumers and the desperation of a struggling designer which has a downward spiraling effect on the design market.   Mike Monteiro from Mule Design sums it up in his “Gap, I have your new logo” post from Off the Hoof.  Another jab at 99 Designs and Crowd sourced design at BonFX.

Oct 11, 2010 – Gap Inc. Issues an official press release- “Gap Listens to Customers and Will Keep the Classic Blue Box Logo”

Oct, 11, 2010 – AP Marketing Writer, Emily Fredrix,  picks up the story and posts:  Gap’s logo back to blue after fans gripe about new – now headlining on Yahoo.com Oct.12, 2010.

Oct 12, 2010 – Richard Grefé, Executive Director of AIGA| the professional association for design, (re) posts his position on Spec work with a letter sent to the Gap on October 7th.

If you want quality, if you have respect for the design process (research, conceptualization, design, testing), along with an ounce of self respect – you’ll pay the designer the true value of the labor and the product.

Why does Limina care about this?  Our customers are primarily software, web-app and website design oriented, looking for ways to improve the user experience.  While this resides heavily in user research and user centered design, it often touches and occasionally includes heavy consideration for brand identity.  We don’t take the subject lightly – use acceptance can make or break a product.  As we’ve seen with Tropicana and now with Gap – this level of market rejection can be costly – fortunately for Gap they didn’t roll out the new design across all of the product lines, stores, packaging, bags and collateral.

UPDATE 10.17.10 – Things just went from bad to worse.  99Designs sent out a blast to the community to participate in “voting” for the best Gap logo design.  It’s as if the 99Designs crew got cold feet  in fear of a backlash from the design community if they picked a weak design.  So they’re throwing it back at the crowd.  “Here…  you guys sort out this mess”.

-Jon Fukuda

Recently, intranets and enterprise systems are being met with s host of new “social web” requirements. How are these new requirements bleeding into the corporate culture? How successfully are these requirements being integrated? What are the challenges, what are the risks and how do you define success?

Our study looks at internal company networks and how they are or are not employing social media as a means of increasing or aiding communication, collaboration, process management and productivity. Our initial responses are giving us a better idea of the importance of social media on the company intranet as well as where issues currently exist that might be preventing companies from making use of the technology.  We’re confident this will be a valuable report.

Our responses are coming from hundreds and potentially thousands of people at all levels of their organizations. We expect that this approach will give us a more accurate representation of the current conditions.

Survey participants will receive a pre-release version of the report when the results are compiled.  Take the survey!

The survey should only take a few minutes to complete. For all questions, there is a “n/a” (not applicable) answer if the question does not apply to you or your company.

About Limina

Our user experience research and design consultancy specializes in user research and complex information design which includes multi‐layered workflows and complex visualizations. We improve user effectiveness, make products easier to learn, operate, and more meaningful in their function.

If you have questions regarding this report and our research program, please contact Mimi Knowels (mknowles at limina-ao dot com).