Center stack ergonomics and iPhone connectivity

Ergonomics and infotainment are tough to evaluate properly when buying a car. When you test-drive the car, it can be hard to pair your phone, dig through every feature, and evaluate ease-of-use while the salesman is hovering nearby. Far too many reviewers gloss over usability issues and fail to provide specific comments or complaints. PC Magazine did review Sensus (Volvo's infotainment system) but focused on bits that no one will ever use, namely, the web browser and 3G connectivity.

One reason I started this blog was to provide some more in-depth evaluation of the V60. When it comes to controls/infotainment, what I really care about is:

- Is this system easy to use and ergonomic?
- Will I be distracted when I'm trying to use this system?
- Are there bugs or glitches?

I could spend days writing about each detail on this car, but I'll try to write only about center stack ergonomics and iPhone connectivity today.

Center Stack Ergonomics

When you first get into the V60 (or S60, or XC60), the center stack can be intimidating. It looks like a sea of homogeneous chicklet-sized buttons. After a short period of acclimation, the layout becomes fairly logical, and I vastly prefer buttons over touchscreens. When driving, it's far less distracting to push a button and have that immediate feedback, compared to swiping and scrolling through touchscreen menus - a task often made worse because you're outstretching your arm and the road may be bumpy. Furthermore, I think knobs are the best human-car interface for most tasks. It's precise, easy to grab without looking, easy to operate with gloves, and provides tactile feedback as you scroll through the detents. I don't know what Honda was thinking when they removed all knobs from their infotainment system and replaced it with a linear touch-based volume slider. Terrible decision.

There are some ergonomic oddities with this center stack, however. Think of some common tasks you might want to do:

"I want to synchronize the left and right climate zones." Sorry, you literally cannot do this. For unclear reason, there is no way to couple the left and right climate controls. If you've got both set to 67 F and you want to change to 70 F, you have to turn both wheels.

"I want to defrost the windshield, but I don't want max defrost." Every car I've driven in the past has two defrost settings - regular, and max. In the Volvo, you can only do max defrost. I don't know why this is not simply called defrost, but there you have it.

"I want to turn the climate control/HVAC completely off." In order to do this, you have to actually turn the small fan speed wheel (marked "Auto") counter-clockwise until the fans shut off. There is no Power button, strangely.

"I want to defrost the mirrors." Actually, the rear window defroster denoted by the square window button also turns on the mirror defrosters, according to the manual. Good to know.

Infotainment - iPhone Interface

As you can see above, Sensus displays menus in a list form and the user uses the right upper knob (labeled "Tune") to scroll through these menus. Embedded within that wheel are the contextual OK/Menu and Exit/Back buttons. 

If you have your iPhone connected via Lightning cable, you can browse your phone contents within Sensus. It's not immediately clear how to browse - In the default Now Playing screen, you have to actually turn the Tune knob at least one detent to enter the track list, and then click Back one or more times to get to the main menu shown above. It's an ergonomic misstep forced by making OK and Menu share a single contextual button.

Note: If you connect via Bluetooth streaming, you do not have any browsing capabilities. It streams what's on your phone only, and you must use the phone for all control such as browsing through tracks.

Within the submenus, scrolling is extremely intuitive with the right scroll wheel. It's very easy to do with peripheral vision and a minimum of attention. You can also use the thumbwheel on the right side of the steering wheel, although this is less ideal for scrolling through long lists. You can also search through your lists with the number pad. Just use it like you're typing on a dumbphone, albeit without T9 predictive capabilities (the young kiddos these days will scoff).

Bugs:
I had previously mentioned that occasionally the connection will fail and cause the audio to skip uncontrollably. This is remedied by going into a different source such as Radio, and then immediately switching back. This has happened three times in about 1000 miles of driving.

Another bug: the Podcast section is completely garbled. The podcasts are there, but they are listed under the wrong titles. For example, my 99% Invisible podcast episode "222 - Combat Hearing Loss" is showing up under This American Life. They seem to be completely mislabeled and there are two entries for 99% Invisible, both containing the wrong things. So, the Podcast organization is very, very broken.

That's it for today!