Buick Envision — Aesthetic >> Usability 🤷♂️
As an engineer who gets excited by the thoughtful design choices of products, I get equally disappointed by terrible design choices. This is just me sharing my thoughts on my random observations to spark a conversation and possibly try and understand the thought process behind design decisions.
In today’s edition of terrible design, we will look at the Buick Envision. A Compact SUV with 228HP.
I had an opportunity to rent this car with Hertz during my trip to Denver and the following are a couple of design decisions in the interior of the vehicle that caught my attention.
Air conditioner controls
Traditionally, vehicle air conditioners were controlled using physical knobs that you can turn clockwise/ anti-clockwise or distinct physical buttons that can be pressed to increase or decrease temperature. Having such physical knobs or buttons enabled quickly locating them when driving without taking your eyes off the road and being reliably able to turn or press a certain number of times to get the desired temperature.
With the evolution of interior design in vehicles, manufacturers have started taking a more minimal approach and thus reducing the number of physical buttons in the car. This has moved these physical controls into a touchscreen that can house multiple controls under various settings pages just like a smartphone can. The jury is still out on if this is a good design choice and that is a discussion for another time.
Now we come to Buick Envision’s interior design, it’s a classic design like any other late 2010 vehicle with a 10-inch touch screen and knobs for volume control and a series of buttons to change the mode of climate control. This in no way is a minimal design. But that design language seems to change just for a subset of controls, namely the temperature controls and seat heaters. These buttons are placed awkwardly towards the lowest portion of the dash which makes it harder to reach and are also entirely touch-based controls with no physical guidance. This makes it impossible to change the temperature without taking your eyes off the road. And to top it off these are weak semi-capacitive touch controls that would not register a touch until hit perfectly. Over the 3 days, I drove this car I had to fiddle with this at least a few times to change the temperature by 1F.
Why though?? Is this “modernization” at the cost of usability🤷♂️?
