This article encapsulates the frustration I felt this weekend trying to help my parents find their way via their fancy new in-car GPS. I eventually realized the

This article encapsulates the frustration I felt this weekend trying to help my parents find their way via their fancy new in-car GPS. I eventually realized their difficulty wasn't just the result of Ford's piss-poor UI,[1] but also a basic conceptual issue. It seems silly to us tech-minded folk, but my parents truly did not understand what role they had in correcting for the GPS's mistakes. It never occurred to them that it was possible to edit the route selection, or just go off-course and wait for the route to recalculate. As the poor map data[2] led them on roundabout routes veering across the state, their response to my pleading that they pre-select the best route (which they already knew about) was simply "let's see where she's taking us." Through constant reinforcement via the media, the abstract 'cloud' paradigm has been deceitfully expanded to represent any new technology.[3] The disembodied voice of the GPS,[4] to them, is an authority rather than simply a tool. UX problems are going to become much more complicated through all of this. We've got to figure out whether our goal is to sell people products or help people to enhance their lives with technology. To do the latter, software needs to be helpfully aware of the possibility of failure. That's what honest, understandable design means to me. [1]: If your designers are too terrible to make a visually distinctive on/off button state, *you need to use sliders*. [2]: (and/or impossible-to-determine avoid highways/tolls setting) [3]: "How does it get maps?" they asked me, a process which, were I not present, they would have simply taken for granted along with the million other points of abstraction necessary for a piece of tech like in-car GPS. [4]: (which they can only refer to as "her" or "she" rather than "it")