Ford changes its dashboard

Ford Fiesta 2011 is all set to have a reformed and fabricated dashboard that can be controlled through a cellphone keypad. Justifying the change may make sense as the Ford Market Research department advised that youngsters were more hitched on to the cell phones other than their wheelers or means of transport. Though Ford Fiesta comes with the new feature of dashboard, when it arrived in the American market in summers, the phone selected by the same was unfashionable and passe standing small in front of iPhones and Motorola Droids. Even the dashboard controls were outdated. As in the cosmopolitan era, the mobile phones advance faster than automobiles, the Ford phones were an indication of the out of date technology used. In 2006, Ford started working on the situation, they already knew the challenge of keeping up in the market upgrading its automotive controls and instrumentation.

Ford motive was to enhance the cabin experience. Ford established a set of principle designs for automotive interfaces which would be applied to all the models. The programme was coded as HAL. Ford acquainted guidance from Ideo, the design consultancy who are well known for the designing of the mouse of the Apple computer and mingle it for the use of palm and for also further high-tech organizations. The director of Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, Bill Moggridge and also the co-founder of Ideo was one of the visionary of the interaction design. In future Ford Models, the standards and guidelines extracted from the interaction design will be implemented all over the world. We wanted to get outside the bubble' says Jennifer Brace, a user interface design engineer at Ford. 'We want expert instruction-by-instruction DNA for vehicle interiors.

After the programme, specifications and guidelines helped in making a universal logic for all Car's systems and switches and also helped in the Ford Edge and Explorer in redesigning of the dashboard. According to Ideo, its finding and methods were based on extensive research and making prototypes for a quick responses. They interviewed seasoned drivers, pilots, ATM users and different section of people from the society. This research is called ethnographic research, a similar study was conducted for the SmartGauge in the Ford Fusion Hybrid. Head of the interface group Iain Roberts, in Ideo’s Chicago office, who led the team working with Ford said that they found and learned from the extreme drivers rather than seasoned ones. As they want to achieve the stats, Ideo wanted to go beyond the conventional drivers as what Ford was doing earlier. For instance, a teenager said that he does not know about the tachometer and Ford never thought of getting rid of it. Ideo in its extensive research found out that six users had 80 percent problems in compiling audio, video and other entertainment sources.

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