Lately Volkswagen has gotten a bit of attention for their concept videos aimed at showing how making things fun can get people to do things a little differently. For example, turning stairs into a piano motivates people to forgo the escalator, and a trash bin with an unnatural echo gathers more trash than a regular one.

And then there’s the new Volkswagen Beetle. Just fun to look at, and fun to drive. I’ve been borrowing my father’s new Beetle for the last few weeks while my car is being fixed, and it’s undeniable that I feel comfortable and sassy in the driver’s seat – remarkable given how much I actually hate driving. But the affordances! Man, the affordances drive me insane. Nothing works the way you’d expect it to work. For example…



The first thing I had do upon getting in the car was adjust the mirrors, and I was fairly stumped by the controls for the side mirrors. My father saw me roll down the window and reach my hand out to adjust it manually, and came running out to show me how to do it “right”. The answer: turn the knob to either “L” or “R”, and then pull on it like a joystick to adjust.

Also, check out the icons for the locks on the left – although they represent symmetric functions (lock, unlock) the icons are not symmetric. That is, “unlock” shows a car door springing open while “lock” shows a key. It seems like it would be easier to put two and two together and figure out that’s the locking control if they looked like they matched somehow. When the icons match, it’s also a little easier to spot the difference and at a glance figure out functionality.




Then I wanted to adjust the seats, but that turned out to be odd. None of the controls worked the way I expected them to. To spring the seat forward for passengers to get into the back, normally I’d reach down to the lever along the bottom, but that lever actually adjusts how wide the bucket seat is. Then I tried turning that wheel, but that did…something, I was never really sure what. Eventually I figured out that I needed to grab that handle near the top of the seat and pull it out. That didn’t map to anything I had seen before in a car.



Time to put on some tunes! Good luck figuring out how to adjust the levels, though. There are a whole lot of conflicting affordance cues here, and none of them seem to work. First, I see the ridges/breaks between buttons and figure out that first, I push what I want to adjust – BAL, for instance. Those dots seemed to say to me that I should run my fingers along the wheel like on an iPod, but no. Then I thought maybe the volume knob doubled as the adjustment knob, but that didn’t seem to work either. I still haven’t really figured out how to adjust the levels and have just left them alone.



Whoops! My oil light came on. Time to pull over and put on my hazards. Hazards, hazards…where are those? Turns out that it’s actually tucked under the main dashboard, inset a few inches. The upside is that the button’s icon is conventional and also bright red – but the downside is that from the angle of the driver, the button is occluded. That’s not a good button to be occluded. Why not put it on the steering wheel or nearer to the radio like I’m used to?



Time to pop the hood and check the oil. But how to pop the hood? This was by far the hardest control to locate. It took a good 15 minutes of hunting (in broad daylight) and then pulling out the driver’s manual to figure out where the hood release was. Turns out the hood release is completely invisible – black like its surroundings with no icon to help you pick it out visually! The lens flare in the picture doesn’t help, but see if you can spot it in the center. I could only find it by feeling around for it.



Cruise control. Oh man. To be fair, cruise control varies even more on every car than the rest of these functions. The Beetle gets points for at least putting it on the turn signal stick like many cars do, but wow, looking at the icons stick doesn’t really help you figure out what goes where. To turn on cruise, the “ON” button doesn’t do it nor does “RES”, but you have to push in the button at the end. “RES” does not actually resume, but if you’re already in cruise it does increase your speed. However, this rocker switch is really difficult to work with your fingers, because there’s actually a fair amount of physical resistance between settings and because it’s just not well designed for ergonomics. Because you as the driver are coming at it head-on, having to pull it from side to side requires a little extra muscular coordination. Try it yourself: if you are extending your arm out in front of you in a small and limited space, it’s easier to maintain fine motor control moving in and out rather than side to side. It’s also hard to do this and not push the stick away from you at the same time. In summary, takes too much attention to do something at 70mph that should be nonvisual and instinctive.



The icon for the windows is visually unintelligible. I get that the broad shape is that of a window, but I’m not really sure what’s going on in there. What’s the white shape? Since the only information the icons really give you is that they’re for the power windows, VW might’ve actually done better to just put “L” and “R” on these buttons, because they’re located in the usual spot for window controls anyway.



That little flower vase, though, included solely for whimsy and the capturing of hearts, does have one unintended useful role: holding my glasses. This feature, by the way, is 100% fun, and a great idea. In a car this small, every little detail was carefully planned out and had to be accounted for, and you just know some designer was standing up in the boardroom, arguing furiously that building in a vase with a little flower is the kind of little detail that makes a user’s heart melt. And they’re right. 20 cents worth of plastic plus a cheap fake flower never garnered so many happy sighs. Of course, after a couple of years you get tired of looking at that flower and try to figure out what else to put into that vase – glasses? pens? but it’s still all good because it’s tucked away in an unobtrusive spot.

So what’s going on here? VW obviously has some talented people working there, and at first glance everything is laid out so neatly and looks just so cute and polished. There are several main problems with these affordances.

Failing to follow conventions. Mainly, the controls don’t map well to what I already know. I’ve never driven a German car before so perhaps this is what all German cars are laid out like. If I really think about it, the controls in my car are also somewhat arbitrarily placed out and designed. All I have to go on is what I already know, and when it doesn’t map, it frustrates me. And on the other hand, I drive a Honda, and the controls map much more to the other American cars I’ve driven so I’m not sure I can just blame this on being a weird foreign car.

Newer has gotta be better. But let’s say the designers at VW may have also thought seriously about keeping conventions, and decided to just go a bold new way that may not map but may be overall more usable. Is it? I don’t know. Is the mirror turn/joystick functionality actually easier to use once I learn it? I don’t really think so, because I still have to attend to it more closely in visually ascertaining that the right mirror is being moved before I pull the joystick. The cruise control has the same problem: it actually takes more visual and mental attention to fiddle with it. If a car is going to reinvent the wheel, they need to make it a top priority to reduce the driver’s cognitive load. That means making sure the driver doesn’t ever have to take their eyes off the road. This should all happen pre-attentively. But then how do you get out of the cycle of always doing things the old stupid way when you really do have better, more innovative ways of doing things? The same way Amazon does things: change things so subtly so slowly that the users will never notice. Or, of course, design it so gosh-darned well that it’s immediately obvious and more usable right out the door.

Users will never bother to read the help pages. Sure, I could pull out the driver’s manual. But we should never expect our users to actually read the manual. Come on! When was the last time you bothered to crack open the manual? It is some weird immutable fact of human nature that we would rather spend 20 minutes mashing random buttons and tearing our hair out than to just spend 5 minutes looking it up. And sure, a car is a big investment, and after you drive it for a while you get so used to the warts that you think other people are weird for not knowing how to use your cruise control. Here’s the thing though: I’ve been driving this car for close to a month now (my car needs a LOT of work) and I should’ve gotten used to the controls by now, but I’m still frustrated whenever I get behind the wheel.

Good thing it’s fun to look at and fun to drive, eh? Zip! Zoom! VW definitely got that part of the user experience right, and that’ll help keep the their drivers distracted while they sort out everything else.