No One's Going to Stop Using Phones in the Car. Here's How We Make That Safer

Mobile devices in cars present a problem with a design solution, not a legislative one.
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Young woman using smartphone in carAtsushi Yamada/Getty

My wife’s 10-year-old car has an expensive built-in navigation system, but anytime she drives out of Portland, she uses Waze on her iPhone. Besides being free, this “social driving” app (now owned by Google) is dramatically smarter and more useful than anything her Lexus offers, and proves its worth regularly, as it did when helping us route around a 30-minute traffic jam last month, on our way back from the Oregon coast. The dark screen of the car’s nav system makes a fine backrest for the phone, while Waze gleefully chimes in with accurate, crowdsourced traffic updates over the sound system via Bluetooth.

For all its utility, this is clearly not an ideal situation: It’s redundant, and the interface is far from optimal, or even entirely safe. Recent government regulation efforts are attempting to bring mobile use in cars under some kind of control, but ultimately it’s not a legislative problem. It’s a design problem.

#### Todd Greco

##### About

Todd Greco is Interaction Design Director at Ziba Design, leading the creation of new software and physical interfaces. Follow him on Twitter [@mrballistic](https://twitter.com/mrBallistic).

Instead of trying to legislate this kind of behavior away, or pretending it doesn’t happen in the first place, we need to figure out how to make it work, safely and effectively. For interaction and user experience designers, this is a familiar problem of designing for context, except in this case, the context is a car.

>A driver is better off in a car designed to work with a phone or wearable device, than hanging onto a hamstrung interface.

Waze is already taking steps of its own to encourage safer use, warning drivers to not use the touch UI when the phone is in motion and--crucially--offering a voice interface instead. Newer aftermarket head units in cars, like those from Pioneer and Alpine, already allow voice control of all major phone activities over Bluetooth, including calling, answering and text messaging. Soon we’ll reach the point where our smartphones can push their screens wirelessly to large format in-car screens, custom-designed for rapid access and low distraction, and integrated with steering wheel controls. Two years from now, I expect technology that makes all of this to look quaint. Designing and developing for smartphones, after all, is far easier than it is for cars, which is why all the interesting things happen there.

An Historical Example

There’s a strong precedent for this type of shift in the failure of so-called Smart TVs over the past few years. Equipped with slow processors to save on production costs, these TVs offered a poor, frustrating navigation experience, especially compared to iPads and gaming consoles. To make things worse, Smart TVs only rarely saw updates to their native apps, gradually rendering them obsolete. For experience designers like myself it was excruciating: an inferior solution, when it would be far easier to provide a beautiful, dumb screen, and connect it via HDMI to a purpose-built, easily upgraded device like a Roku, Chromecast or Xbox.

In-dash car UI is in the same spot right now. Almost without exception, a driver is better off in a car designed to work with a phone or wearable device, than hanging onto a hamstrung interface that’s locked in time. The fact is, people already use smartphones in their cars for navigating and communicating, not because they’re foolish or reckless, but because their cars don’t give them what they need.

Look at the typical car UI. Generally blue and black, it’s a beveled mess of buttons and icons resembling an ATM from 1998 more than a modern tablet. This is the natural outcome of the car industry’s long development times and overbearing regulation. It’s hard to innovate when you must constantly worry about edge cases: users wearing gloves, devices that don’t break for 10 years, etc. Couple that with legal requirements dictating response timing on interactions, sizing for ADA compliance, and dozens of other specifics, and you end up with something that’s relevant when first conceived, but obviously wrong for the context in which it’s eventually used.

As an interaction designer who works in both app creation and automobile interfaces, I can tell you that regulation is rarely effective at solving these problems, even when aimed at necessary goals like ADA compliance. When designers worry about whether a proposed concept will satisfy rules written three years ago, we spend more time avoiding lawsuits than creating better experiences.

We Need Smarter Thinking About Context

What we need instead is a call to action, for experience designers to really design for context correctly. There’s certainly no shortage of tools at our disposal. Perhaps cars could include a USB-driven dock (like the Elevation dock, which works for various connectors and devices) that’s within Bluetooth range but not easily accessible to the driver. This would enforce using voice and dash controls, and keep drivers focused on the task at hand (i.e. driving). Car manufacturers could take a page from consumer technology and start pushing regular firmware updates to customers after sale. The ability to connect to a smartphone could encourage them to stop treating in-car interfaces like something embedded in amber, and more like a fluid platform for innovation. I don’t want a Lexus app store, and I really don’t want to worry about rogue apps opening my sunroof at 4 a.m., but I do want interactions that update regularly, and the ability to craft my own menu.

What if there were a prize for the best use of in-car interactions? Or even better, what if the NHTSA sponsored an incubation studio for startups, to develop innovative solutions to the twin problems of screen interactions and driving? Or we could sponsor Pioneer or Alpine in their efforts to do the same, banking on the idea that the aftermarket could finally kick innovation into newer vehicles. Google and Apple are already pushing into this space as well, which will hopefully open up new APIs and make it easier to integrate phones into newer cars. This should be encouraged.

Distracted driving is a massive safety problem, but the difficulty of enforcement makes it clear that new laws won’t put the genie back in the bottle. Instead, let’s redesign the bottle. Make these new interactions not just safer, but preferable to the existing, dangerous alternative. This will pave the way for new experiences that we haven’t even thought of yet, instead of legislating them away before they see the light of day.