Quixotic Bravado by Josh Babetski

Maintenance Required Light

I just had my car in for service before going on world tour. Normal scheduled maintenance stuff. Of course cars these days have little lights that go on and in my case a little text display that says “Maint Reqd” when the car hits certain mileage on the odometer.  It seems they failed to reset it last time I was in and yesterday it went off and would not go away — very annoying!

 It was easy enough to get taken car of. I swung by the dealer and on the second attempt they remembered the combination of steps to reset the alert. It’s:

Right-blinker, brake, left blinker, honk the horn twice, put a classical music station on the radio, hold the trip meter, then press start.

 Maybe it was a little simpler than that.  The story here is that it’s amazing what a little light can do to the user experience. By design it’s suppose to do two things: remind the user to keep their vehicle maintained and ensure that the garage has reoccurring business.  The downside of the user experience is not making it easy and intuitive to reset the alert for those of us who do take care of our vehicles, thus creating a negative reaction to the feature. This “lowest common denominator” design is all too common and in my opinion lazy UX design.