Form Over Function Gone Insane

[Mike Rivers]

Hey Mike ... My Prius Prime has over 1100 pages of owner manual. This is a consumer device! What make it worse is you cannot look up item in the index unless you know the correct Toyota term for it. I see it as a big problem for product designers. I can give you a million features to tweak but we"ll never live long enough to find and understand them all.

 

Except for the page count, which is probably in the ballpark, you've just described Pro Tools, or Cubase, or just about any other DAW. I realized this morning when I got in the car that the clock time was displayed in three easily seen places. I did manage to get the MPG bar graph off the Main screen, and replaced it with the Phone display, which is equally useless to me, but less annoying.

 

I'll have to try the last several years models method of changing how the doors lock and unlock to see if it works even though it's no longer in the manual.

 

And speaking of things you can do with your car, have you seen the web site that Richart Factor (of Eventide) built on the practicality of using your Prius as an emergency power souce for your house? Pri-UPS?

[Mike Rivers]

Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle. While paging through the car's menu trying, before I turned in the rental car, to find out how to delete all my phone contacts that it grabbed without asking (I did, and did) I stumbled across a second "Vehicle Settings" page on the LCD menu completely different from the one in the small display menu, where there's a table for turning the door locking functions on and off. This is what the manual says needs to be done by the dealer.

 

Good user interfaces need to be easy to find..