Tesla took the request, never questioned the validity and implemented a change for drivers and passengers in a few months and updated all the vehicles at no charge. I for one will not suggest they don't know software.
To be clear, I never suggested they don't know software, just that at times, I think their user interfaces feel like they (and lots of other companies, to be fair) would benefit from taking the time to read about the history of UI design to learn from others' mistakes rather than remaking them all over again.
To give a really straightforward example, consider the door UI for the model X. Most people naturally see things at the top as being forward of things at the bottom, because they are used to seeing top-down views in other interfaces. But instead of laying out the doors in natural order from front to back, Tesla put the gull wing doors at the top — the
back doors. This means that at a glance, most new users will assume that those upper door buttons open and close the front doors, and that the lower buttons open and close the back doors.
As a result, I've closed my leg in the driver's door multiple times because their door UI is so completely and utterly backwards from a human interface perspective. You literally have to think about what the buttons do every time you hit one. That's not the way user interfaces are supposed to work.
So why did they design it that way? Apparently, somebody at Tesla felt that being able to visualize the height of the gull wing doors was more important than being able to instantly visually recognize which door you were opening or closing. The problem is that the design is optimized for entirely the wrong use case. The number of times I've cared about manually choosing the gull wing door height? Zero. I'm sure there are situations where it would be useful, but they're few and far between. By contrast, being able to tap a button and open or close a door without thinking? That's something that I do several times per day, often with painful consequences.
The first rule of UI design — and the rule that we were always taught to cling to above all others — is to make common tasks easy and uncommon tasks possible. One way that you can make common tasks easier is by emphasizing
recognition over recall. Recognizing the locations of doors spatially is entirely natural. Recalling a mapping between seemingly arbitrarily positioned buttons and the locations of the doors that they control is much less so. By making a relatively uncommon action (manually telling the car to open the gull wing door only halfway) easier to visualize, they were forced into other unnatural layout decisions that cause significant cognitive load for the much more common case, thus making the common tasks harder. The result is simply not good UI design.
The irony, of course, is that Tesla's website brags about this being an improvement. I shudder to think about what the screen must have looked like previously.
[*pauses to do a quick Google search*]
Okay, so the original design, despite being a little ugly, was approximately correct.
[*cries unconsolably*]
