Heads-Up: The GUI Gets Real

I recently attended a lecture about Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). One of the main points that the lecturer made was that you have to build the GUI to suit the needs of the users. Users want everything - and what they want may not be what they need. So the important thing is to understand who your users are (demographic, knowledge, limitations, etc).

You then have to arrange all of the elements of the GUI to tell a story. That is, you need to define the sequence of actions (the process) such that the GUI helps the user to know where he is, what he is doing, how he got there, and what to do next. As the GUI designer, the story you want to tell includes the order in which the various elements on the page are seen by the user. It is very important that the first thing you see on the screen is one that tells you exactly where you are and gives you some indication of what you can do there.

Recently, a question was posed on the Techshoret email list about the best tool for developing Help for mobile devices. Until now, most Help authoring tools did not address large variances in screen size. That is also something the lecturer touched on - what device will the user be using? The type of device determines how you compose the GUI. For example, if the user is viewing the GUI on a television, she is sitting five feet away; on a computer, she is one foot away; on a mobile device, she is perhaps only inches away.

During the course of the lecture, we were shown a number of different types of GUIs, one of which was a screenshot of a GPS device. On the way home from work that day, I thought about one of the fundamentals of GUI design: keep it simple. GPS device GUIs are anything but simple.


A GPS Device (see yesterday's blog)


I don't use a GPS device regularly, but I have seen them in action while riding in taxis and I have played with these gadgets in friends' cars. The first thing that strikes me about the GUI of every GPS device I have seen is that they are cluttered and busy. Typically, the screen is relatively small (I have not seen any larger than seven inches), the majority of the screen is a rendering of a map (with different colors for different types of roads), overlayed with semi-transparent controls, a moving triangle indicating your current position, a compass and other information, such as street names, the speed limit and road conditions. The driver is then expected to glance from time to time at the small screen, sift through the extraneous information, see where he is now and where he is going, all while trying not to drive into oncoming traffic.

It is true that GPS devices deliver voice instructions to drivers, but if developers go to so much effort to display the map, then there must be some advantage to having it on a screen.


BMW's Heads-Up Display (HUD)

So it got me thinking: The whole purpose of the GPS is to help the driver navigate to his destination. The driver should be doing nothing other than focusing on the road. Therefore, a heads-up display (HUD) would be perfect. In-car HUDs display the speedometer and other critical information on the windshield. Pilots use HUDs all the time. Why not use HUDs to display GPS information?

Then I thought, hang on a minute, having all that GPS data on the windshield would be more distracting than helpful. The driver's eyes will constantly need to shift focus from the HUD information on the windshield to the road ahead. Didn't the GUI lecturer tell us that most people can only deal with five elements at a time? Driving already takes up a large percentage of our concentration, having to switch back and forth between the road and the HUD would inevitably cause accidents.

I came up with a pretty clever solution: an augmented reality HUD. Drivers may want to see a map that shows the entire county, city or state, but that is not what they need. In this case, the purpose of a GPS is to give drivers instructions on how to get to their destination. Therefore, they really only need to know which lane they should be in, when to turn, how far to their destination (really important if you are driving an EV) and so on. An augmented reality HUD will deliver all that information without distracting the driver.

Augmented reality HUDs can include features such as virtual road signs displaying the distance to your destination, or virtual roadside indications of the speed limit, upcoming intersections, changed traffic conditions, and so on. The information will be displayed on the windshield of the car, but the driver will view them as if they are by the side of the road. In other words, the information will be where any driver would naturally expect to see it: on road signs by the side of the road.

Virtual painted road markings could also be used so that a driver can be told that he needs to change lanes now in order to turn left at the next intersection. That is, useful information located where the driver would normally expect to see it.

For this system to work, a series of cameras on the outside of the car and cameras inside the car would need to be installed. The cameras on the outside of the car would help the augmented reality HUD to calculate the edges of the road for correct placement of the signs. The cameras inside the car  will be gaze-tracking devices for detecting the position of the driver's eyes so that the computer can properly calculate the correct perspective and angles.

I could make millions from this idea, if only GM hadn't thought of it first:

---

Comments are most welcome!
Subscribe to Y. Karp? Why Not! or follow on Facebook (see the side-bar).
Add this blog to your RSS feed reader