Counterintuitive Controls
 

All cars have their little "opps". Engineers aren't perfect, And even when you don't agree with their choices, they can given you many good reasons why their choices were the right ones. But here are two things I just don't understand:

1) The delay setting for the windshield wipers. When the knob is turned in the UP direction (as seen from your thumb) the wiper interval should shorten...but in our car the interval is increased. Opps. For what its worth, I also think that the arm itself moves in the wrong direction (down position 1 for intermittent - down position 2 for low - down position 3 for rapid).

2) The door lock button. The upper half of the switch is lock and and the lower is unlock. This runs counter to any car I've ever seen. Opps.

What the heck were these guys thinking?

I'm gonna go ahead and say, dawg you nitpicking like no other.

I found neither of these things to be standout issues and, now that you point them out, I rather like them this way rather than the supposed normal way...

2005 Camry, same thing. Hardly an "oops"

-alex

I've been driving a WRX (which works the way you expect) and Sequoia (which works like the twins) for 10 years. Both make sense to me. It's only confusing because they are different. In the WRX, you turn the knob forward to increase the rate. In the Toyota you turn it forward to increase the delay.

It can be discombobulating. My daily driver, a Mazda, is just the opposite in both cases. I was surprised at the inconsistency.

Not nitpicking...not even complaining...just pointing it out.

I've been a licensed driver for 35 years and have owned 25 or more cars. I've rented at lease that number of vehicles during business travel. This is the first time I've encountered these configurations. They just seem like odd choices.

Like spelling "oops" with two p's and one o? OPPS ;)

On the automatic, when you have it in "manual" mode, if you use the stick, fwd is up, and back is down in gear. 100% backwards from every race car I've seen, where you pull back for upshift, and push forward for downshifts...using inertia, rather than working against it.

This is usually the difference between Japanese vehicles and the rest of the world. It all depends on the original designer and the engineers though.

Windshield wiper speed settings piss me off to no end. It's always backwards no matter how many times I try to remember.

Norton (and many other British) bikes have pedal shifters on the opposite side of most motorcycles on the road.

It's really not odd. It's just not what everyone else uses and is just a mental roadblock to get over.

-alex

I went to school for graphic design and interactive communication and learned a lot about how people perceive things, and how to communicate ideas intuitively and creatively without spelling out instructions. Human interface is something that's always intrigued me.

After getting past all the odd legacy quirks of cars in general, things like this (wiper delay) aren't necesarily a point of frustration or bad design, but they just feel odd when it's different from one car to another. Should they all be identical? Should they all be completely different? What makes it right or wrong? To me, considering the stalk in this particular situation, I would personally assume a roll forward motion to mean more of something, and a roll back motion to mean less of that same thing. Controlling the delay within this respect is a bit abstract. Most people would assume more wiper or less wiper because its intuitive, not trial and error until you learn. (Another example is a kitchen sink light switch next to the disposal switch, which should be on the left or right?

Some people think this is stupid, it's just a switch. But then again, how much thought went into the ergonomics of the 86's driver position? Same overall concept, just bigger scale.

Glad to see someone else who thinks about these things. I'm a UI/UX Engineer as my career, and I think about these things dozens of times a day in software and also in real-world objects. Really fascinating once you get into it.