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Anybody else get confused by whether the arrow represents where the car should be or the pump?
by ryanjshaw 9mo ago
Anybody else get confused by whether the arrow represents where the car should be or the pump?
- LoFiSamurai 9mo agoNo
- michaelmdresser 9mo agoI think this is the source of me misinterpreting the symbol a few times, so yes.
- sublinear 9mo agoI agree. As much as people appreciate the factoid, it's not an example of good design. I don't ever recall the arrow being paid attention to until listicles and other blog spam were born. It has all the elements of great clickbait.
- gk1 9mo agoI actually use it all the time when driving a rental.
- mhdhn 9mo agoI use it all the time because I switch between a lot of different cars a lot, and my memory is not that great.
- jquery 9mo agoThat isn’t in conflict with it being bad design.
- mschild 9mo agoTrue. Though im unsure of what would be a better one. Doesnt get much simpler than an arrow. Id think that for a car you own you wouldnt need it after the first few times though.
- chillstreem 9mo agoa better solution would have been to have an industry wide standard icon for the fuel inlet and then an arrow would point on which side of the vehicle it is. The way it is now with the pump icon really can be confusing. If the arrow is pointing right, it seems to be suggesting the driver should go to the right of the pump which is obviously wrong. I like the way EVs have the squiggly hose icon and that tells you everyting.it doesn't depict the charger station, but the plug point on the vehicle.
- lucketone 9mo ago“Directions are ambiguous, when somebody says turn right, I grab the wheel by the bottom and move the hand to the right” *Technically* it could be less ambiguous, but actually it is good enough. If memorising this is hard, not a big problem, parking next to fuel pump twice is not that huge of a damage.
- rtgfhyuj 9mo agoin the absence of industry wide standards, this is an ingenious design, 100% best thing possible
- mayneack 9mo agoI use it regularly
- jquery 9mo agoIt’s terrible design. Until I encountered one of these listicles I had no idea what that arrow was.
- icambron 9mo agoI use it regularly when driving an unfamiliar car. I also don’t think it’s ambiguous: it’s a drawing of a gas pump and an arrow telling you where it should be from here, which is a convention from signage the world over. “Paris ->” has never meant “you are this way relative to Paris.” The design I used to find confusing was the controls for periodic windshield wipers: does the width the triangle indicator represent frequency or period? I eventually just managed to memorize that it means frequency because you get more wiping as you turn it “up”. I don’t think anyone else ever found this ambiguous; we all have our little intuition gaps, I guess.
- sublinear 9mo agoWell, you need to pull up to the side of the gas pump. It's not an "intuition gap". The arrow is ambiguous. You don't pull up next to Paris, but I would get a chuckle if the icon had a little Eiffel tower instead of a gas pump.
- rtgfhyuj 9mo agonah, the pump is visibly physically, dont need an arroq thats idiotic
- maxerickson 9mo agoBaader–Meinhof phenomenon. The fact that it is consistent across vehicles sort of mitigates the problems with it. "Arrow points at fuel door" is not actually hard to remember.
- KellyCriterion 9mo agoIsnt it that nowadays usually on the side of the driving seat? Or does this apply only to EU vehicles? Im not a regular car user, if at all Im renting - but the last 10 times(?) it was always just on the side of the driving seat
- apparent 9mo agoI think it depends. Especially with PHEVs, which also have a charge port, whose location is determined by charging infrastructure, and which is not IME on the same side as the gas tank opening.
- tripledry 9mo agoIm not aware of such a convention, I'm in the EU and most cars I've owned or driven has it on the opposite side of the driving seat. Might just be a coincidence
- scott_w 9mo agoIt’s a coincidence because the UK uses the same cars and ours are mostly on the same side (because we’re right hand drive where you’re left hand drive).
- onion2k 9mo agoIsnt it that nowadays usually on the side of the driving seat? Or does this apply only to EU vehicles? That would mean designing two separate entire fuel tank placements, fuel lines, etc for cars that are available both in left- and right-hand drive variants, with different SKUs for each of the parts needed. There is no way a car manufacturer would do that.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- mongol 9mo agoI do. It is not obvious in any case
- Revisional_Sin 9mo agoYeah, it's a bit counter-intuitive.
- Taek 9mo agoThe arrow indicates where the hole is.
- quickthrowman 9mo agoIt points towards both the gas pump and also the side of the car that has the fuel filler, it’s impossible to confuse.