Get ready to push!

Driving cross country in you car can be quite exciting. Whether it’s stopping in small, quaint towns hardly noticeable on a map, flying down coastal highways with perililous views from below, or enjoying the endless horizons of the plains. However, that state of happiness is usually immediately broken when you notice out of the corner of your eye, the low fuel status icon has now appeared.

To me, this indicator is a design that creates more mental load than necessary. I’m in the middle of no where, I haven’t seen a gas station or fuel information sign in miles and now on top of my uneasiness, I must calculate and predict how far I can go without running out of gas. Here’s what going on in my head:

• Did this status light just go on?
• Or has it been on for many miles?
• How many miles am I going to have to walk to find a gas station after I ran out of gas?
• Do I have the appropriate walking shoes?

However, bad it may appear, this icon does have some good qualities.

• It is universally understood. The icon's graphic clearly represents it’s meaning without ambiguity across cultures.
• It turns on before I run out of gas, giving me some time to plan my next steps.
• Its luminance is clearly different from the background and any other status icons that might be on and visible.

Maybe we won't have to push

Maybe the fear of running out of gas will come to end (I’m not referring to alternate energy sources here) due to an improved display design on our dashboard.

We are now aware that this fuel icon has both effective and ineffective qualities to communicate its intention. All of which can be improved to some degree to make the user experience much more satisfying.

Here are my suggestions:

• Make the initial warning light blink on and off with added pauses in a calculated repetition. Because our short term memory can only hold about three chunks of information at a time, we usually store chunks that are important to the task at hand. If a warning status light appears on without undergoing periodic state changes, our current attention will not focus on it and we’ll forget it’s even there.
• Provide more surface information. Imagine if this status icon was interactive. By pushing it, it may reveal numerical information about how many miles you have left before you run out of gas.
• Provide drilldown access to additional information. Provide a button that is linked to your GPS navigation map. This could reveal your current location and the manageable route to the nearest gas station that you could make before you run out of gas.

Drilldown and the Mobile Space

Ever since the birth of language, humans have used hierarchical structures to organize information about objects and their meanings. Without this capacity, we would cease to exist. Early mankind was forced to adopt quickly to an information organization system to understand the difference between objects and their relationships. They had to know relationships of predator and prey, between edible and poisonous foods, family and tribes, etc. As their experiences turned into knowledge, the more developed and refined these relationships became.

Today, we are fortunate to have technology that can organize this information for us. We just must learn how to appropriately access it.

In this particular chapter, we are concerned with using appropriate drilldown widgets to access information that is organized hierarchically based on parent-child relationships within the mobile space.

NEVER just put text down without link styling or an indicator!

Super duper need a compare table here, and maybe some extra text about how to choose which one. So me discussion under the Indicator pattern.

• Link

• Button

• Indicator

• Icon

• Stack of Items

• Annotation