My husband drives a 1997 Explorer. It pre-dates our relationship. The engine has given us very few problems over the years, but things are starting to break. Luckily the hubby is frugal and an expert at finding instructions on how to replace everything from door handles (3) to seat belts (1). The most complicated repair he has done is on the power window. There are some little bitty plastic gear things inside that apparently get worn to little crumbs over the course of 17 years. The YouTube video cautions to follow directions exactly. If you do it wrong, you can slice off body parts. Yikes.
Last year he replaced the driver's side. This year the passenger side stopped working, so he reviewed the video, bought another packet of the plastic doo-hickies, and had at it. There are magnets that are part of this whole assembly. And we found out after he was done that if you put them in the wrong way, when you press the up button on the window it goes down and vice versa. We all laughed it off, decided it wasn't worth another hour and a half to take it all apart and flip them around. We don't use the window all that often and it's kind of funny that it's backwards.
A few weeks ago I got my first new car since 1996. Granted, I had one new-to-me car in between, but since it was almost an exact copy of the 1996 car it felt like the same car for all that time. I love my new car. Love, love, love it. But there is a major flaw in the audio system.
There are three bands for XM radio. We have designated one the pop band. The first four stations are, in order, The Blend, Hits, 80s, and 90s. The nice touch screen puts them in a list with The Blend on top (in slot number 1) and 90s at the bottom (in slot number 4). To change stations I can push on the one I want.
But it also has buttons on the steering wheel to move between presets. One arrow points up and one points down. Here is where we get to the second example of when up is down and down is up. To move from The Blend to Hits, I have to push the up arrow. Remember, on the screen, The Blend is right above Hits, so my instincts say to push the down arrow. But no, since The Blend is 1 and Hits is 2, and 2 is higher than 1, I have to hit the up arrow. This is wrong, wrong, wrong.
I have seen this on TV/cable/satellite remotes when visiting other people. Ours, however, goes the other way. (The right way.) I had to sit and ponder to figure out what causes the problem, and this is where my subtitle comes in. We have two mental models at work here. One is the visual representation which says down arrow to go down in the list. The other model is that to go to a bigger number you go up. Two models which independently make sense. But taken together, they are in complete conflict.
In this case, the designers chose wrong. The visual representation is much stronger than the numerical one. The numbers are just labels. They don't really mean anything. The fact that I have used my DVR controls for years without ever noticing that, "Hey, to go from channel 124 to 125 I hit the down arrow, weird," tells you the visual is what's important.
And let's say somebody at the car company just couldn't deal with the numerical model being completely backwards. Is there another solution? I looked to my old car for that answer. It didn't have the nice display, but it also had an up and down arrow for moving between presets. But the six presets weren't listed top to bottom. Since it was manual buttons, they went left to right. So for that situation, up going from 1 to 2, left to right, makes sense.
Back to my touch screen. Top to bottom really is the best way to display it visually. So what do you do with the buttons? The obvious solution is to reverse the functions and have up go from 2 to 1 so it matches the screen. The alternative is to switch the buttons to have a left and right arrow. Then they act more like next and previous, so right can move from 1 to 2, and left from 2 to 1.
We put 2500 miles on the car over our Christmas road trip, and I'm still struggling with the buttons. The only wan I can do it at all is to think of the up button as next and the down button as previous. But I really shouldn't have to think so hard to change the darn channel.
