Monday, October 25, 2010

Does the Ford UI Destroy Night Vision?



The first rule of designing for night time use is: Do NOT use blue, because it destroys your night vision. Red is much better.

Ford's been making cars for longer than anyone. Certainly they have people who know about this. Why then?

Or is the difference between colors on night vision overstated?

2 comments:

I just need to nag said...

horrible use of fonts. The GUI needs a bit more effort in my point of view. If i were to buy an expensive hybrid i wouldn't wanna look at horrible graphics for the next 5-6 years when the next car that comes in has a better GUI.

Johan said...

No, red light is marginally faster when gaining the dark adaptation back, but in reality it's not any difference.
The most important factor is to keep the light as dim as possible.

So I think the colour choice of car displays is more a choice of branding. F.x VW that uses blue light with red details.
I personally have dimmed the interior lights to the lowest possible in my VW Golf. I mean during day it's not useful and in the dark a very low light is well enough.