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That's genius. It's more than PR, it's an organic user experience with mainstream familiarity for hundreds of millions of people. If I were at a large car compa
by motohagiography 6y ago
That's genius. It's more than PR, it's an organic user experience with mainstream familiarity for hundreds of millions of people. If I were at a large car company, this is easily worth the price of 2-3 engineers.
As a product manager, I would use the popular understanding of KITT as a reference early-adopter customer experience, not to replicate, but as a median.
KITT's dashboard instrumentation is amazing (and oddly seems to have a synth ASD envelope if you look closely), which seems hilarious, but the point is to be a sophisticated command console for powerful operations, which is what it looks like. Totally different from the disconnected infotainment web pages of today.
The entire car UX today is about permission, approval, safety, and comfort, like a kind of suburban living room in a display case. Whereas what the KITT (and motorcycle) UX is about is measurement, instrumentation, and consequence. A KITT style UX may be the secret to getting self-driving car traction because almost nobody will believe autonomous land vehicles are safe, but they will believe they are powerful.
I should do a self-driving car startup.
- intrepidhero 6y agoI love the "powerful" retro sci-fi look but let's be honest about KITT, this UX is (unsurprisingly) terrible. All those glowy bar-graphs that line up perfectly are hard to differentiate and flat out inappropriate for some measurements. There is way more information presented than needed, and it's not grouped into logical clusters at all. It looks super cool but it's a safety nightmare. The dashboard morphed a little during the show's run. KITT must have got an upgrade because the speedometer max went from 200 to 500 MPH. It's got a built in printer! I'm dying to know what "Propagation Delay HRS" is supposed to mean. And you know it's 80s because: no blue LEDs. https://knight-rider.fandom.com/wiki/K.I.T.T._(2000) https://knight-rider.fandom.com/wiki/K.I.T.T._(2000) https://www.deviantart.com/davemetlesits/art/Kitt-dash-S1-2-Revised-74115257 https://www.deviantart.com/davemetlesits/art/Kitt-dash-S1-2-... https://www.deviantart.com/davemetlesits/art/Knight-Rider-Kitt-dash-25153106 https://www.deviantart.com/davemetlesits/art/Knight-Rider-Ki...
- motohagiography 6y agoThere with you on the nightmare aspect, but having spent time in tech, powerful looking but meaningless is a big selling point. It's representative and preformative. It's like when an enterprise customer says, "I know your product does this thing, but I need it to show everyone else it's doing it, and how sophisticated it is so they come to me to get it done!" A product doesn't need to solve a problem (looking at you, every security product ever), it needs to let the customer demonstrate value to their own coalition. The point of KITT was it made the Hoff look cool without the cost and risk of a sidekick co-star. I wouldn't replicate the dash, but I would certainly use it as a reference example for something that did that job. Great links, such a strange thing to be discussing a 40yr old fictional talking car.