I finally got the newest version of the maps today, in release 2018.26.2. What bothers me the most is the tiny, unreadable gray text. What is this fascination that Tesla seems to have with making the displayed text so faint that it is unreadable? This is a large part of what changed with version 8 -- the fonts got smaller and lighter in color to the point that much of the text on the instrument cluster is unreadable. I suspect someone is using some font that they think is "fashionable" or "subtle" or some such nonsense, and forgetting about actual usability!
They no doubt do their design mockups on some huge monitor where they can read it just fine and think anyone that can't is just an old fart who should not be driving or something.
Can't help but wonder if the SAE or some similar group has standards for this, and whether or not Tesla tries to follow them, and whether they meet them....
Sorry for the rant, this sort of thing (subtle, pretty, fashionable instead if usable) makes me a bit crazy.
short of just firing it up briefly to see what the new Nav looks like, since I got the new version I haven't used it to actually plot a course somewhere while driving so I can't say if I like the new look or not, yet.
however I totally agree with your general point about the
increasing use of
low-contrast fonts and
colours - it's a general issue which I've noticed over the past quite-a-few years now - on the web, in GUIs for computers, smartphones, TV set top boxes, etc etc.
Somewhere along the way it became a fashionable design trend to reduce the contrast between text and background, at the unfortunate expense of readability
. Pretty sure most of these UI designers still have young eyes and big screen monitors when they're admiring their light gray or light blue fonts on medium gray backgrounds. If they could only
see what these things look like when your eyes age 2 or 3 decades...
There needs a bit of return to Design for Usability over design for design's-sake -
especially in the case of a car where safety may be an issue. UI designers today could use some re-education on this matter, IMO. It should be mandatory that all UI designers consult a
contrast checker tool AND have someone with older eyes than theirs to review their UI design under various lighting conditions. Or at the very least, perhaps provide some configurability of font size/contrast to the end user (the iPhone's very useful text display and Accessibility settings come to mind)
Bring back good ol' fashioned high contrast text!
Low-Contrast Text Is Not the Answer