Driving Design: Redesigning the iDrive
October 20th, 2006
This was a project I completed with Carl Smith, Mohammad Rahman, and Nicholas Prada, to redesign BMW’s first automotive computer interface, the iDrive.
(This was an academic project, unaffiliated with BMW.)
The iDrive was a single control knob tied to a small monitor on the car’s dashboard. This knob was intended to control more than a hundred different functions. Unfortunately, iDrive’s menus were confusing, inconsistent, incoherent, and wound up getting the company very negative publicity. Our team estimated millions of dollars in losses tied to poor sales of iDrive-equipped cars.
In this project, we wanted to show how BMW might have avoided these problems if they had used simple task analysis design techniques… without even changing their clever, but not very suitable, hardware controls.
Click the image above to see the final article, which was published in the September, 2005 issue of User Experience magazine. It includes a short description of our design approach, screenshots, and even a critique of our work by several automotive experts.