SBD’s UX team recently carried out a full UX evaluation of the Honda e in Germany. It’s a car designed to evoke the Urban EV concept shown in 2017, attempting to echo both the design and the ambitious technologies of that concept, but with the constraints of a production car.
The interior features an almost full-width display area, with two large touchscreens and a digital instrument cluster, book-ended by two Camera Monitoring System (CMS) screens. Combined with its wide, flat wood trim and grey seats, Honda has designed the interior to feel like a lounge.
The Honda e is among the first cars to launch with a CMS rather than conventional mirrors. A small camera pod on each door feeds dedicated displays at either end of the dashboard, and a third camera feeds the central rear-view mirror, although this can be toggled to a conventional reflective surface.
There are several benefits to this, including improved aerodynamics, reduced blind spots and a notable wow-factor. But, there are clear down-sides too. The most significant issues are the lack of ability to perceive depth, and the performance in rainy and dark conditions. From a user experience point of view, it is currently difficult to find a tangible advantage to CMS over conventional mirrors and, although Honda’s solution is in most ways preferable to that in the Audi e-tron, it still provides minimal evidence to support a transition. The hardware includes a 12.3-inch central and passenger-side display, an 8.8-inch instrument cluster and two 6-inch CMS screens. Rather than a conventional driver and passenger screen layout, the two main screens adjoin and work together rather than in isolation from each other. This somewhat blurs the boundary for the driver and can take longer to understand than a conventional single-screen configuration, particularly as the only obvious shortcut for functions such as FM radio are far over on the passenger side.
While much of the infotainment system demonstrates an attempt to push boundaries, this has not carried through to the instrument cluster. The design is cluttered and empty, with some areas crowded with content. and others with much empty space. Information is not grouped intuitively: some crowded areas contain multiple different types of content with no segmentation. Visual alignment is lacking, and the customizable area is extremely small and restrictive resulting in truncated words and a low level of customization.
But, there are several fun features are evident in the e, which fit well with the overall ethos of the car. An aquarium app displays a virtual fish tank with fish that the user can choose and ‘feed’, the VPA system has an avatar and features such as ‘tell me a joke’, different wallpapers can be chosen and provision is made to connect a gaming console through an HDMI port and inverter running a domestic AC plug socket. While there are minimal real-life use cases for many of these features, they are likely to make an impression at the dealership. Overall, this is a system one wants to like, and most of the issues are, in isolation, relatively minor. However, in combination, they result in an interface that feels unnecessarily frustrating, inconsistent and overly complicated. Although the system promises a great deal, in its current form it is confusing to use and does not manage to live up to expectations. However, with improvements to the software, it still has ample ability to become very effective and competitive, due to the robust and well-implemented hardware. About SBD Automotive's UX evaluations: The Honda e report is the fifth in a series of 12 infotainment expert user experience evaluations SBD Automotive is carrying out this year. These reports have been produced for several years and provide an expert evaluation of the leading navigation and infotainment systems in the European, US, Chinese and Japanese markets. The series has four main objectives, aimed at supporting clients at various stages of the development cycle: Benchmark and score, Define areas of concern, Outline best practice and Provide tangible recommendations. For these studies, SBD Automotive evaluates the three core components of user experience: functionality, ergonomics and usability, to ensure a fair score can be provided across each system evaluated. The reports rely on a robust methodology that has been developed over the lifetime of the series. It captures over 1,000 data points across 12 different disciplines including static and dynamic testing, system performance, a feature checklist and SUS scoring (see charts) to build a data set that can be consistently benchmarked against all competitor cars, including an overall final percentage system UX score.