Even better is my car. When it hits around an eighth of a tank, it 'stutters', i.e. it reduces the throttle for a few moments, so that you are aware that you are getting low on gas, but are not on reserve yet. It is fun enough when you are just cruising down the road to suddenly start slowing down for no apparent reason, but if you happen to be accellerating, say from a stop at a red light, it will actually kill the engine! Real fun to find your self stopping dead in the middle of a busy intersection trying to get your car to start again (What? Did you remember you need to be in Park to start the car?) while cars going the other way are zipping around you...
Many seem to just quit, no warning, presumably to protect the injectors from clogging due to crud at the bottom of the tank.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
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Actually there is more than one document. I recommned starting with mil- std-1472. There are also nice IBM documents on Commom User Interface standrds that are quite useful.
Standards is just one of the things i do usefully well.
The problem is these aren't designed with the entire population in mind. E.g., a fighter pilot in combat is far more focused (and motivated! :> ) than a 70 year old retiree with failing hearing, vision, attention, etc. Or, someone with a hearing impairment...
I've canvassed lots of research papers trying to sort out how these sorts of things affect "real people". And, coerced different people to be guinea pigs as I tested out various approaches. Not very scientific and no "hard and fast rules". E.g., how often can a person be "interrupted"? How far apart in space can those cues be sited? How do you manage the inevitable "overload"?
But, it brought me to the "three layer" model which also seems intuitive (and, very easy for most people to relate to -- as they ultimately will have to configure it!)
My favorite is a feature on Ford vehicles. You can speed limit the car. I found this out when I rented a Ford Focus from ZipCar. I'm a left lane, heavy footed driver and so I punched the accelerator. It limits at
80MPH and it warns you as it gets toward that limit.
But if they quit before the tank is completely empty, that would at best protect from sucking op crud that floats on top of the fuel. The intake pipe is always at the bottom of the tank, so crud from the bottom will also get sucked in with a full tank. Luckily, most have an intake filter.
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Stef (remove caps, dashes and .invalid from e-mail address to reply by mail)
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Only if they catch the first beep. Single tone vs modulated tone is better and for long enough to be clear.
Mine will do that for frost alert which seems quite reasonable to me. Not sure what it does for low oil warning yet - this is the first car I have had with electronic only indication and no physical dip stick.
That is scary. What model of car has such an insane behaviour?
Mine has a warning light that goes beep with 100 mile range remaining and will beep every time the car is started when range is below 100.
How does that work? Engine management should never allow a modern car engine to stall on an automatic. My (manual clutch) car has smarts to switch the engine off when it is stationary at traffic lights.
I once had a weird immobiliser fault that did that to us in a busy intersection - nothing to do apart from get out and wait for a tow truck. The fault never recurred but failed unit was referred to the maker as the local repair guy couldn't do a satisfactory reset on it.
With no electrics you can't even put the hazard flashers on!
It's not on all Ford vehicles, and is also available on vehicles from a variety of other manufacturers. There are also innumerable aftermarket kits you can install to do the same thing. Primary market is parents, rental agencies, and fleet users. In some locations such things are required by law for larger vehicles (for example all larger trucks and busses in the UK all have a speed governor limiting them to
90 km/h*), although those tend not to be (end-user) programmable like the typical ones for cars.
There have even been examples where different keys had different limits. Some Corvettes limited the speed and engine power when started with the valet key, for example.
Some other cars have taken a monitoring approach instead - at least one model of BMW allowed you to set a limit, and if it was exceeded, an indicator on the dash would light and stay lit until it was reset (which needed a password). So it wouldn't prevent your kid from going fast, but you'd know about it the next time you drove the car.
*FSVO "all": The limit has changed over time, and I don't know what the grandfathering rules are, so it's possible some older vehicles with slightly higher limits are still on the road, plus there are vehicles that have a lower limit.
LCD displays are cheap enough that they could use one to display the actual problem rather than just an idiot light that says 'CHECK ENGINE'. A 16x2 would do, but a 20x4 would be better. Use the aural alarm to alert you to the problem, with one of two distinct signals for immediate problems, and ones that need attention soon. If the engine is low on oil, or overheating you can't wait. Other low fluids can damage the vehicle, but I don't need a 'CHECK ENGINE' light coming on to tell me the Freon level is low. If it's already lit for that minor problem, it can't alert you to more important things.
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While it is focused military applications a lot of what it has to say is quite generally applicapable. While is does not much deal with people with impaiments it does address environmental interference.
Agreed. I'm just saying that designing to standards like this is pretty much like designing for what a "nominal" person is expected to be -- not really the population as a whole.
(E.g., young children, elderly, folks with various "disabilities", etc. aren't addressed, here)
I think I explained it up-thread. But, basically, treat audio as existing in three "layers":
- background is stuff that we know is there yet essentially "ignore". Like conversations happening around us IN WHICH WE ARE NOT PARTICIPANTS. Or, "background music". Or, the TV chattering away while you are doing something else. It's there; you recognize that it's there; you'd notice if it suddenly went missing; you *might* catch something of interest "happening" in that layer (e.g., if you manage to hear folks talking about *you*!); but, for the most part, you ignore it.
- foreground/focus is that with which you are actively engaged. The conversation you are participating in. A TV broadcast you are listening to (over the background noise of other conversations nearby). A musical score. You are PAYING ATTENTION to its content as you are "interested" in it (at least, for the moment).
- distractions/annunciators/interruptions/alerts. An asynchronous layer of events that compete for your attention/focus. A young kid wandering into the room while you're watching TV asking for something to eat. A phone ringing. Doorbell. Fire alarm. etc. Each tries to distract your "focus" and become your *new* focus.
Thinking in this sort of framework, a user's abilities can then be mapped to relative volume levels (if the background is too loud, you can't concentrate on the focus/foreground; if an annunciator is too soft, it won't stand out against the foreground and background; etc.) and temporal/physical displacements (annunciators occurring too close to each other in time/space can't be successfully and reliably resolved -- you are "overloaded" by too many distractions).
I.e., it takes some amount of "processing power" to "register" an annunciator (interruption), recognize what it signifies, and then evaluate that significance in the context of your current "focus" (do I really want to be bothered answering that phone call, now?).
A *second* interruption occurring before a previous interruption has been "handled" rapidly overloads your ability to *remember* which interruptions are "enqueued" (remember, an interruption need not be a persistent sound: "the dyer signal went off", "someone rang the doorbell", "dinner is ready", etc.).
And, how close together such events can be for a *particular* individual varies -- with the individual (some folks are a bit more sluggish to react), with the current focus (dealing with an interruption while totally engrossed in an activity vs. just casually watching TV), with the nature and familiarity of the alert ("what the hell is that sound?").
While a particular person may not be able to decide, a priori, how close together (in time/space) alerts can occur for his/her abilities, he/she can still relate to the idea of dealing with sound on these three "layers". It doesn't require a technical description of how the brain processes sound, The Cocktail Party Effect, etc.
I contend that a successful audio display (is defined as) provides an effective way for the user (listener) to manage that "alert" layer of events -- swapping them into his "focus", etc. And, building a predictable framework that minimizes the need for the user to "remember" what has occurred (but been ignored/deferred).
[I think we are better able to remember visual events than aural ones -- we have "language" that comes to our aid to distill a visual image into a summary of what it represents. Audio events aren't always as easily and deterministically distilled ("it was a beep of some sort"; "it was a screeching sort of sound"; etc.) So, you have to take care to give the user some way of quickly "resolving" the nature of an alert ("it was the telephone ringing"; "it was the doorbell"; "it sounded like water running"; "IT CAME FROM OVER THERE"; etc.) so he doesn't have to try to remember the actual *sound*]
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