“Let’s go pick up the boys from school with the new car!” Our new second-hand electric vehicle, a 2019 Kia Niro, has just been delivered, and our country school is a good spot to try it out. Ems grabs her coat and I pull the charging plug to disconnect the car. It stays on the wall. Ah, in itself logical that they do that, to prevent people from uncoupling the car when charging in the public space and even taking off with the cable. But this is our first time that the car is on the charger and I suddenly realize I don’t know how to get it off.
I look on the dashboard to see if there is a button, like you have to open a fuel cap. Nope. Also no notice on the dashboard saying ‘do this or that to unlink’. Enter the menu then. No nothing. This is against the interaction rule that a design should give hints on how to perform at least the most important and common actions. In the end it all gets too tight and we decide to take the other old faithful combustion car.
When we get back from picking up the boys from school I go through the whole car one more time, but I can’t get out. So I open the instruction booklet and end up somewhere in the nineties. A black and white booklet, messy, unattractive layout and unclear texts. Our previous car was from 2011, and you immediately notice that this new one is really a bit more advanced. That makes the difference in quality with the instruction booklet even greater. In the book, time seems to have stood still for the past thirty years.
I can’t find what I’m looking for in the stress and try YouTube. In any case, Kia has instructional videos for a newer version of the Niro, but only from the end of 2020, at the time of the updated model. Bit late to the party, but at least they’re taking advantage of newer ways to provide instructions for use. Now a neat landing page on the Kia site, on which the instructional videos per type can be found, for example next to the instruction booklets. Which preferably pops up quickly if you search for ‘Kia Niro electrical instruction videos’.
The basic idea is that a product explains itself, so that you can see in or on the car how to disconnect the cable. But just because a product should explain itself, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also design the explanation well – the instruction manual or the videos. Anyway, how do you disconnect the cable? In the first fifteen seconds after you open the car, the cable can be released, after which it will lock again. You just need to know.
Jasper van Kuijk on Twitter: @jaspervankuijk