DesignAday

Don’t let the door lacerate you on the way out.

I do not carry the reputation of a klutz. I’m more likely to be thought of as slow and overly thoughtful of my actions. If I weren’t a designer, I’d likely be embarrassed to admit that I have cut my leg when closing the door after exiting my car… twice. It literally drew blood both times. The first time I did it, I didn’t think too much about it, chalking it up to a careless moment. The second time it happened, I decided there must be something wrong with the design of my car.

Upon examination, I realized that the styling of the front doors of my Nissan Cube are atypical. On most cars, the bottom corner of the door is rounded off or angled inward. The Cube’s door is the exact opposite.

This photo is showing the passenger-side, front door. The picture is taken looking at the inside of the door with the door open. As you can see, it comes to a point. What’s harder to tell in this image is that the point sticks out beyond the rest of the door. In other words, if you opened the door into the wall of your garage, this point is what would hit. Notice in the background the rounded bottom corner of the door to my wife’s Mazda5.

So, when I’m parked in a lot beside another car and don’t have room to open my door all the way, I slide out and shut the door while I’m close enough for the edge of the door to brush my shoulder. The point at the bottom of the door juts out just far enough to scrape across my calf.

I understand why they shaped the door that way. It makes for nice lines when you are looking at the car. I don’t believe nice lines are worth bleeding for.

In the Details: Auto-Up

I can remember being impressed as a child that my grandparents’ car had power windows. That was a really cool feature and so much easier and faster than the hand cranks in my parents’ car. These days, it is extremely rare to find a car that doesn’t have power windows as a standard feature. My colleague and I were quite surprised on a recent business trip when we had to pay a toll and realized that the windows in our Jeep Compass rental had to be cranked.

The additional ability to open automatically with a single press of a button was a convenient feature, and I always thought it would be nice for them to close automatically as well. Of course, that would require that the mechanism be able to detect an obstruction, such as a person’s fingers, and reverse. This adds a fair amount of complexity and cost, and may therefore not be worth the extra convenience.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the driver-side window in my Nissan Cube does have an auto-up feature, which I’m finding to be at least as useful as auto-down. When I’m pulling out of a drive-through with cups and straws and bags of food, it helps to be able to free up a hand that would otherwise be pulling the window switch up. I have yet to test it for a safety feature, however.

Touch My Shag

If you have been reading this blog regularly, you know that I recently purchased a Nissan Cube. I’ve been enjoying the car quite a bit. I still have yet to see another one on the road, and everyone asks me about it.

One feature of it in particular always seems to pique people’s curiosity. “What is that thing on the dash?”

Nissan calls it a Shag Dash Topper. It sits right in the middle of the dash, in a slight depression, and is colored to match the interior of the vehicle. There is nothing practical about it, as is evidenced by their own marketing:

“Everything’s better with shag. This two-tone dash topper with velcro backing sits in place right up front.”

That doesn’t keep people from theorizing, though. Many have suggested that you could set your phone there and it would keep it from sliding off. I don’t think so. Almost everyone asks if it came with the car or if I put it there, which I find rather amusing. Most people ask what it is for, and some insist that it must be there for a practical purpose. Really? Why? Why can’t it just be there because it is quirky? Isn’t it enough that it attracts attention and starts conversations? Men typically make fun of it, but nearly everyone, especially women, have to feel it.

I initially thought it was rather silly, but I have come to adore it, if for no other reason than the reactions it provokes from other people. One of the primary design goals of the Cube is to be fun, and my impractical shag dash topper is certainly that.

Practical Lessons from Games: Rewards

Whether it is the singular distinction of being “the winner,” access to additional content, or monetary in nature, every game benefits from a reward system. Certainly, games are played because they are enjoyable, but the reward is what makes any task within a game worthy of the time and effort spent. For shorter games, there may only be a single pay-off at the end. More involved games will likely have multiple, relatively small rewards building up to the end game finale. Such rewards are typically in-game, giving you more lives, more power, new abilities, better equipment, or allowing access to other areas of the game.

Then there are games like World of Warcraft (WoW), in which the game never actually ends. Such games must incorporate many different reward systems to keep players engaged. In a relatively recent patch, for instance, WoW added “Achievements” that keep track of all manner of things you can do in the game that aren’t actually necessary to progress. You collect achievements completely for the sake of collecting them—there is no benefit to your character. It is a surprisingly effective mechanic that adds yet one more layer of gameplay onto an already rich environment.

Such reward systems have only rarely been included in business applications. For example, Quicken will congratulate you every time one of your accounts balances. This isn’t particularly compelling, but imagine if it were taken a few steps further. First, pick a behavior that you want to encourage in your product—say, saving money. Set a goal, or allow the user to set one. In the case of saving money, the goal could be a significant purchase, or it could simply be a continuously tracked metric, such as setting aside $100 a month. Now assign a reward. If the goal is a significant purchase, that is the reward. For a continuous goal, there should be various levels at which the user is rewarded, some of them with small rewards and larger rewards at longer intervals. To keep the goal forefront in the user’s mind, visualize their progress.

This approach could be applied to software development, secretarial duties, lab work, education—practically any job that utilizes computer software and has trackable metrics. Sales people are already compensated in rewards-based systems. It doesn’t even have to be that tangible. Hybrid vehicles have incorporated rewards to encourage efficient driving behaviors.

Rewards are powerful motivators that can be used to advantage in software applications. They can encourage good behaviors, and sometimes just make otherwise boring tasks more enjoyable.

In the Details: Brightness

When you turn the headlights on, a car assumes that you are driving at night and dims the dashboard lighting. Of course, you may have turned them on because you are driving through a construction zone, or because it is raining, in which case, the dash doesn’t need to be dimmed, and it becomes hard to see. For these cases, a control is included that allows you to adjust the brightness of the dashboard lighting.

In my PT Cruiser, it was a dial that first returned the dash to daytime brightness, and then turned on the interior lights if you kept turning it. My Cube has a button on the instrument panel right beside the one that cycles through various displays such as gas mileage and the trip meter. I don’t know what the designer of this particular feature was thinking. There must be a dozen brightness levels, and you have to hold down the button for a good ten seconds or so to cycle through them. So, when I turn on my headlights in the daytime, to see my instrument panel, I have to press and hold the button as it gets dimmer and dimmer, finally turning off completely, and then turning on at full brightness.

I can think of no reason that I’ll ever need any of the brightness levels other than full brightness and the single step down that it takes when the headlights come on. I wouldn’t mind all of the levels being there if it were a single, quick action to switch between the two that I will use. Why on earth would you want to turn it off altogether? It seems to have been done simply because it could be done, without any thought given to how it would be used.

In the Details: Unlock

In my previous car, pulling the handle on the driver-side door would automatically unlock the door. The rest of the doors had to be unlocked before the handle would open the door. This always seemed to confound my co-workers, who thought I had the child locks on.

My new Cube has a very thoughtful feature. It unlocks all of the doors, not when the engine stops, but when the key is removed from the ignition. It takes removal of the key as the intention to exit the vehicle, which nearly always is correct. This also could serve as a reminder for the driver to take his key with him, as his door won’t open until he removes the key or specifically unlocks the door. Not only do the passenger doors all unlock, but the tailgate as well. After all, you might want to remove something from the trunk, and why should you have to unlock that separately?

iPod Assimilation

One of the features of my new Nissan Cube that I was really looking forward to is the iPod integration. For years now, I’ve been relying on cassette adapters, FM transmitters, and in my wife’s Mazda5, an auxiliary jack. The cassette adapters tended to be noisy. FM transmitters are prone to interference. If the iPhone is plugged into the power and the aux jack at the same time in the Mazda, a hum comes through the speakers.

Now I can plug my iPhone directly into the center column using a dock connector. There’s no interference—no extraneous noise of any kind. But there is a problem.

I thought iPod integration would be a great thing, but now I realize that what I’m actually doing is replacing the large, colorful, touch screen of my iPhone with a single-line, low-res, orange text display and a few multi-purpose buttons. It is now extremely tedious to find the podcast that I want to listen to next. There is no way to tell it to play a particular playlist in shuffle mode. And because the car acts as a tethered device, it takes over the iPod app on the phone. I can’t navigate using the iPhone when it is plugged in. This means that if I want to shuffle a playlist, I must select the playlist and tell it to shuffle before I plug the iPhone into the car.

“iPod integration” isn’t integration so much as it is assimilation.

In the Details: Cup Holders

It’s hard to believe that, once upon a time, cars didn’t have cup holders. I remember the cheap, perilous, plastic cup holsters that hooked onto the inside of the car door. These days, manufacturers wouldn’t dream of selling a car without several cup holders strategically positioned throughout the car. It’s a feature that most people pay little attention to when purchasing a car, yet one that can be a real annoyance if not well designed.

I’m now the proud owner of a Nissan Cube Krõm. One of the first things my wife noticed and pointed out was a cup holder. It had been thoughtfully placed on the dash, just to the left of the steering wheel—a position which puts the cup within your peripheral vision without moving your eyes from the road. I have oft had difficulties trying to get my cup into the holder between the seats in my wife’s Mazda5. There is something about it that just makes it hard for me to find—especially at night. The Cube also has a trifecta of cup holders in the center console, but these are illuminated by the accent lighting, which I assume will make them much easier to find.

We Have a Winner!

I received email from Nissan last week informing me that the Cube is here. So, I drove over to the Nissan dealership Saturday to check it out. They had two of them on the lot, and I was taking a test drive not ten minutes after I arrived. The salesman was apologizing that they hadn’t been trained on it yet, and was reading over the information I had printed off of the website while I was driving.

It occurred to me that I’m excited about the Cube for all the same reasons that I was excited about the PT Cruiser.

• It has a unique design. Love it or hate it, you can’t deny that it has style—a personality. It will catch people’s attention, and won’t be mistaken for some other car (although my daughters have already pointed to a Honda Element and a Scion xB and said, “Look Daddy, it’s a cube!”).
• It is practical. As small as it seems, it is spacious on the inside. There is a lot of headroom, plenty of legroom, and a fair amount of storage space. It is versatile, allowing you to carry a lot of cargo, a lot of passengers, or a little of each.
• The interior design makes use of color, texture, and a pond ripple motif to make it feel friendly, comfortable, and richer than other cars in the same price range. Much like the flower vase that comes in the contemporary Volkswagen Beetle, it has little eccentricities that show that considerable thought was given to the design.
• It is affordable. When I first saw a picture of the PT Cruiser, I figured it would be priced like a sports car, putting it out of my league. I was excited to learn that you could get one well equipped for $20,000. The Cube is very reasonably priced, and it comes with a lot of features that you don’t expect in that price range, such as Vehicle Dynamic Control and Continuously Variable Transmission.

On top of all that, it has respectable gas mileage, a very tight turning radius, and remarkably comfortable seats. I was sold. I decided to go for the special Krõm edition, which came with all of the options I was interested in, as well as some niceties that I felt I could afford to treat myself with, and sportier styling that appealed to me more than the standard models. As luck would have it, the dealership already has that exact model, built exactly the way I want it, scheduled for delivery any day now. By the end of the week, I’ll be cubed.

I will feel a little sad handing over my Cruiser. It’s been a fine car, and I’m still proud to own it. It suits me. However, my new crush will likely keep my mind off of it. It’s time for something new.

No Nissan for You!

The other day, I mentioned that I’m starting to look for a new car. One that I’m very interested in learning more about is the Nissan Cube, which is supposed to be available this Spring. They don’t have much in the way of detailed information on their website, so I registered to have them send me a brochure. I got it in the mail. It is a four-panel fold-out with pretty pictures and less information than is on the site, but it contains a CD.

“Great,” I think, “There’s bound to be some information on that!” Then I read the minimum requirements.

• Pentium 4, 2 GHz or better
• 1 GB of RAM
• Windows XP or Vista
• DirectX 9 compliant graphics card

Seriously?! In this day and age, they couldn’t go to what tiny little effort it would take to make it run on a Mac too?

Crossover was able to install the application, but it was designed to be controlled using a webcam. You are supposed to hold the brochure in front of your webcam to reveal information within the app. While Crossover would run the application, it couldn’t utilize my iSight.

So, they sent out a CD-ROM that requires a webcam, but didn’t make it compatible with Macs, that all come with webcams! I’m willing to bet that a high percentage of webcam owners are also Mac owners.

Stupid marketing! I’d be really interested to know what percentage of the people that get the CD are actually able to view it.