They made you pay three grand not to listen to music?

A Hummer Navigation System Tale of Woe

As the president of a Web design firm, I pride myself on being a usability expert. I'm technically savvy and am usually the first adopter of new technology. I've found, however, that many designers make things more complicated than they should be. Take my truck's navigation system, for example.

I am one of those silly mid-Atlantic people who isn't very good at driving in snow. It used to be that when it snowed, I would depend on someone else to drive me where I needed to be. One year my firm was in the middle of a very large site build for a client and we were hit with nearly 2 feet of snow in the middle of the project. Staff couldn't get to work and deadlines were being threatened. After that fiasco, I finally broke down and bought a very large utility vehicle to prevent it from happening again.

When I started shopping for a truck, I wanted to make sure that it would be comfortable enough and feature-rich enough to replace the car that I was driving. At the time, I was driving a pretty nifty car, complete with a navigation system and integrated phone system, a "concierge" that doubled as theft protection and very comfortable heated seats. I was surprised to learn that many of the higher end GM trucks offered many of these features... and was even more surprised to drive these trucks and realize that they were as comfortable to drive as my car. So I made up my mind and I bought the new big truck.

When it came time to talk about everything that I wanted in the truck, my number one priority was the navigation system. I had grown very dependent on the navigation system in my car, and I get lost easily, so it was a major priority. The salesman told me that he would get busy trying to find the truck in the color that I wanted, with the features that I wanted and the navigation system. In about a month, my truck arrived and I was ready for my first lesson in how to use it.

We started with the navigation system. We programmed my home address. This way, wherever I was, I could call up my home address and actually get home without having to program the city, state, street, etc. Now you would think that would have been the beginning of a lovely relationship between me and Nat, the navigation system. A few weeks passed and I was about an hour from home and wanted to use Nat to get me home. I recalled the address from memory, and what followed was not an easy ride home and canceling out of Nat was just about impossible.

A couple things to mention: GM was in their second round of navigation systems. They charged nearly $3000 for this system to be installed in the car and you had to give up the ability to listen to CD's in the car because of the physical location of the system. Overall, I would say that their navigation system was a design disaster at go. I had to wonder if their product development team bothered to do any research into other systems during their development process. I would bet if they did, they would have designed their interface completely differently.

My god-daughter is a brilliant young lady in her very early 20s. She grew up computing and has no fear of technology. One day we went bike riding and I told her my tale of woe with the navigation system so she went to town trying to figure out how to use the navigation system with the manual as I drove us to our bike trail. She gave up after about 30 minutes of trying.

I called the dealership to complain and they explained that I needed to go through a training seminar in order to learn how to use this navigation system. I didn't make the appointment to go. After all, interfaces are supposed to be designed for humans, right? This should be intuitive. At the time of this writing, I have had this truck now for over a year and still have not used this very-important-to-me-at-time-of-purchase feature. I just sent our office administrator out to my truck to see if she could make sense out of the nav system, as we prepared to write this little buyer beware on GM navigation systems and although she was able to figure out how it worked, she identified a few features that need improvement.

After spending 30 minutes in the truck, driving around town, she came back in with a frustrated look. "They made you pay three grand not to listen to music?" she asked. That's right. Since Nat requires a DVD to be inserted into the CD drive, you can't listen to CDs while driving. Besides that, she noted that the menu button has a nice picture, but nothing that would indicate a menu. It would be nice if the buttons said "menu" and "back." The joystick is difficult to use since enter gets confused with left when you're driving. I spent a good 3 minutes trying to enter in an address with it. The process you go through to add a destination doesn't make much sense and if you forget to push "navigate," it won't tell you where to go.

I've since given up on Nat and resort to common street maps when needed. I don't recommend spending the extra money, should the opportunity present itself. It's more of a hassle than it's worth. Although I'm slightly embarrassed to admit I can't figure something out, I believe in consumer awareness and I wanted to get the word out. In the meantime, I'll be more careful picking out features when pimping my ride.

Kari White
Brook Group, LTD
8231 Main Street
Ellicott City, MD 21043
410.465.7805
www.brookgroup.com
www.usabilityandbranding.com
www.brandville.com