That's just a contrived hook, and it's wrong on top of that.

If you're driving a bike you'll know this: 2/3rds of your brake power comes from the front wheel, if you're in a turn and you need your front wheel brake that badly you are in big trouble. Most likely you'll end up on the pavement.

Turning and braking are done separately, and during emergency evasive maneuvers (the lorry pulling out) signaling is the least of your worries.

The sequence normally is:

- check your lanes

- indicate your turn

- wait for a bit to get the rest of the traffic to notice your turn signal

- meanwhile, reduce speed and shift down if appropriate

- make your move

So what if one bike brand does it different than others ? Bike users - unlike web visitors - are adaptable creatures, they know their bikes inside out.

Under normal circumstances, one should not brake and turn. But neither should cage drivers turn left in front of you. Or merge into your lane. Or run yellow lights. This stuff happens on the road, and this why so many riders get hurt.

To think that the normal sequence of events is the only one worth designing for is naive.

The post was about how to consider the human context when designing, and used the bike as an example. Any design decision that could delay a rider's reaction time to the primary brake is a bad idea, regardless of how familiar you are with your bike or how adaptable you may be.

When designing websites there is a good case to be made for sticking to the familiar (unless you want to make a point) but to use motor cycle design (especially BMW, one of the most renowned bike brands on the planet with a lot more design credit than the author) as an example is poorly chosen.

The whole idea is that you have the thumb of your right hand pretty much in that spot anyway, so no reaction time is lost, rather the opposite, you don't have to make that awkward reset motion with your left hand in order to switch off the blinkers after having made a right hand turn.

This is more convenient, not less convenient.

BTW: Cars blinkers don't reset when changing lanes. There's also that joke about solving the problem of indicating left and forgetting about it. The solution is that if you haven't turned left after 15 seconds, the car automatically turns left.

- indicate your turn while your hand is off the brake lever, the Mack truck ahead of you suddenly stops.

But I'll give you this: the main objection to it is the emotional "not rightness of it", rather than the factual likelihood * severity of the scenario. I bet the blogger is still riding that bike.

BMW Motorrad is similar to Apple in many ways:

* Both were early players in their respective markets. Moreso than many other manufacturers, they have a lot of history to draw from.

* Both are known for their design and sense of style. A BMW motorcycle, like an Apple device, is almost instantly recognizable once you know the visual cues of each.

* Both are premium products at premium prices, designed against disposability. A BMW motorcycle and an Apple computer will typically outlast 2-3 of the average competitor's products, while costing about 1.5x as much.

* Both have absolutely rabid followings, winning the kind of fanaticism you can only produce by decades of selling beautiful products that perform beautifully.

The BMW turn signals map closely to the Apple 1-button mouse. Is it the most functional design? Nah. But the customers barely care. The design is functional enough, and it conjures the brand very effectively.

Here, both BMW and Apple "missed" the waves of standardization to user controls; their controls were always good enough from the start, however, and since the users didn't make a stink about it, both highly successful manufacturers left well enough alone.

Looking from our vantage point in the present, sure, someone moving to a BMW or Apple interface will notice a few differences (or, in your words, it will be "inconsistent with virtually every other"). But when you look at it from the point in time at which these interfaces were designed, both were groundbreaking and best-of-breed. Macs had a mouse when their closest competitors would draw some text like "C:>" and drool at you. BMW had foot-shift and hand-clutch when their closest competitors had suicide-shift and clutch pedals. It took another 40 or 50 years for motorcycles to agree upon right-hand throttle, even.

Personally, I don't buy the left-brain/right-brain argument you put forth, and I consider the danger pretty low because turn signals get the absolutely lowest priority when I am riding and need to react to emerging situations (that's pretty-talk for "when the dude in the F-150 aims at me suddenly"). I ride a Honda and I am pleased with the left-thumb directional controls, but I bet I could get used to a BMW pretty quickly.... and any donations to test this theory are gratefully accepted. But in any case, I think you need to see some more of the history behind the controls before you can use them as a UI teaching tool.

But I think you make a false assumption about the potential order of operations - I'm not worried about signaling a lane change when I'm in the middle of an emergency, I'm worried about the emergency occurring when I'm in the middle of signaling a lane change. :-)

Too little and you might as well not do it, too much (and what is too much depends on a large amount of factors) and you're in a skid or you get launched over the front wheel.

The rear wheel brake is about 1/3 of the braking power, it is however quite safe to apply nearly all of that 1/3rd because the feedback is a negative one. The front wheel brake however has positive feedback, as you brake harder your front fork will compress putting more pressure on the tire increasing road contact and so on. Plenty of people that don't realize this and get on a double-disc brake bike and hit the front wheel brake too hard have found out that it is very easy to get flying lessons.

There are lots of patents on such brake linkages but I've never actually seen a bike that had one.

However, I can readily imagine using some gyroscopes to check that the bike is not flipping and if it's approaching a flip to release break pressure momentarily to keep the back end down. This would need to be very finely tuned as you'd rather endo into a stop with your tyre touching a truck than you would ride with two wheels down and hit the truck at speed. The amount of back-wheel air that you'd cope with will depend on the driver and conditions quite a bit.

Any biker worth their salt could ride either model and with little preference at that. My last bike (in a long dark past) was a Honda, with the left hand thumb arrangement, I can easily see why the BMW arrangement might be a little bit more convenient but so little that it really doesn't matter.

And if you're busy with your signals while doing emergency evasive maneuvers I hope you have your health insurance paid up.

Something else to consider - many of the newer BMW designs have moved to the 'standard' approach. Why make the move, given the 'brand' value already mentioned and the history behind the design?

3 reasons come instantly to mind - consistency, human physiology and safety. :-)

I can see the 'consistency' angle. After all, if 90% of the market does it one way being 'counter culture' is sometimes helpful sometimes a hindrance. User interfaces on motorbikes are a lot less easily customized than on websites after all.

I see some reasons why the BMW design is better, but there is lots of evidence to the contrary out there:

http://www.motorcyclenews.com/MCN/community/Forums/Categorie...

Wait, what?

For me it's hard to think of a company with more disposable products than Apple's.

"Oh, you have an OLD generation iPod? I see... Well, that's OK, it still plays songs..."

The built-in obsolescence is of a different kind, but it's as strong as any other company's.

In my 21 years of Mac usage, I simply do not share your experience.

I had a 15" old-gen MacBook Pro. Ran like a dream, and physically much sturdier than just about any of the plastic crap out there. I had it for 2.5y before what I wanted to do outstripped what it was capable of offering and I switched to a unibody MacBook Pro.

That's what the previous poster is getting at. Yes, the Mac will remain functional for a long time, but what's the point?

I do just fine with a 2GHZ Core 2 Duo (1MB L2) desktop PC with 1GB RAM (I've even used it to run Windows Vista in VMWare on Ubuntu). Heck, you wouldn't notice the difference between my PC and my 1 year old MacBook with 2GB RAM and a 2.4GHZ Core 2 Duo (2MB L2), mostly because I keep my Ubuntu install in very good shape. If I was using Debian, Arch or Slackware, I could get even more performance out of this baby.

It's likely that I will not be upgrading this PC for a few more years. Thanks to cheap, low-end netbooks, operating systems are getting lighter. I expect this trend will continue for some time, and I intend to take full advantage of it, partly because I don't want to waste perfectly good electronics, but mostly because I want to see how long I can keep them running :p

Computers never get old. They just become incompatible with the state-of-the-art.

My point is this: go and survey today's Apple users, and ask them what they like about the products, or why they decided to buy. I'm willing to bet that "durability" will not be in the top three reasons.

Apple is one of the very few tech companies who has managed to meld its products into a fashion item, and over the last few years (since the first iPod, really), that is what made them as successful as they are today, NOT durability.

This also means that people want to replace their Apple products with shinier, newer models, long before they actually stop working.

I can't comment on BMW bikes, but I think the same is true of BMW cars - how many people buy a brand new BMW with the intention of driving it for 20 years?

I disagree with this. While the design of the a macbook is nicer than any other laptop I can think of, I had to replace the motherboard, optical drive, wrist rest, LCD panel, trackpad, and webcam before it was three years old. Granted I did use it extensively, but I don't think that my usage would have destroyed a Dell latitude or Lenovo Thinkpad any quicker. In fact, I am expecting my current Dell E6500 to last longer than may macbook did.

I suspect that you can find someone with an anecdote describing a perfectly functioning mac and one that exploded. The same such anecdotes likely also exist for people running Thinkpads, Latitudes, et al.

On the other hand my 2 years old macbook is starting to make some strange sound (the fan probably needs to be changed)...

I think that anecdotes are only that and in my experience once you have a problem with a laptop it's usually going to be more than one problem...

As a motorcyclist I don't see an immediate, obvious advantage to the BMW approach vs. the standard approach but like most things on motorcycles, you may need to actually use it before it makes sense to you.

So it looks like I now have an excuse to spend some time riding Beemers...

Anyway, I never found 3. to be a problem on my R100GS (w/ early K-style controls) but I think there's another really important point here: supporting those three buttons requires a whole mess of relays, latches and so on, in a black box the size of a couple of packs of cigs, hidden away under the tank. If it fails, like mine did, there's no way to do a roadside repair. It's a black box, literally.

Whereas the standard setup has one simple mechanical switch and one flasher can and not many wires. Its very simple to diagnose and you can get a new flasher can anywhere for $5.

The appropriate BMW slogan: "Why simple, when complicated works?"

What brands have the indicator stalk on the right ?

I've seen different arrangements for the wipers and the headlight switches though (sometimes on the stalk, sometimes on the dash, left & right).

'Normally' (depending on your definition of 'normal') it is clutch on the left, brakes in the middle and accelerator on the right foot.

Funny how they would do that different than even in the UK, where all cars I've seen had their indicator stalks on the left.

It seems to be more of a regional thing than anything else.

Makes me wonder what Japan is like... (they also drive on the left).

BTW, you can still find some old cars on the roads here which have the gears on the left hand side of the steering wheel :O

I have one like that :), not sure about your definition of 'older', but it is from 2004. It's a RHD Copen.

I've driven quite a few different cars (mainly UK, some Spanish/French hire cars, SEAT/Peugot) as we used to hire instead of owning and so I'd drive a different make/model every time. They differ in indicator placement. Similarly some cars use a stalk (rotating end switch) for headlights whilst others use a dashboard mounted dial switch. Some cars have a stalk-end switch for the horn whilst others use buttons either side of the steering wheel and others use the whole steering wheel center (this appears to be less common now as it has an air-bag in it though Renaults have always had a stalk based horn from what I can tell).

My current car, a Citroen Xsara Picasso (right hand drive) has a left-stalk, the car I learnt in (many years ago) was a Nissan Micra 1.0 and had a right-stalk indicator. I'm afraid I can't remember on the others to be certain but they definitely have been a mixture. I think the Renault Megane Scenic we had prior to this had the indicator right-stalk as I clearly remember putting the wipers on when lane changing - but that might well be that the hire cars we used around that time (2 different Vauxhalls) had the indicator that side, not sure.

On Japanese cars ( right hand drive ), all the stalks are reversed from the exported left hand drive model. This means that Japan cars have the turn signal on the right, upward motion signaling a left turn and downward a right turn. The shifter is of course in the middle console, so is on the drivers left. The wiper control stalk is on the left. The ignition control is on the right.

I am curious if the motorcycle controls are reversed though. I guess I'll find that out in a few months.

Much easier to remember any turn indicator for cars is always in the direction of the turn of the steering wheel. This helped me immensely when I moved back from Oman (cars and roads the American way) to India (everything the UK way). And also, this way I only had to re-learn the location of the indicator stalk, so that I could avoid flipping on the windshield wipers :-)

p.s: Are there ANY cars that do not follow the "direction of steering wheel" rule for their indicator stalks? Would be interesting to know this..

e.g. To turn left, you turn the steering wheel counter-clockwise and likewise with the turn indicator. The 'top' or 'bottom' of the wheel is irrelevant.

Thank you for the info!

Thank goodness they are exactly the same, but I do wonder how that piece of standardization came about.

Porsche also made some race cars with the accelerator on the left to make it quicker to do 'Le Mans starts' - where the driver must run to the car and start it.

With those engines, there's a very direct connection between the user's movements (moving the tiller) and the way the boat moves in response. It's not immediately obvious, but it becomes natural once you create a mental model around it - in the same way that using a turn signal on a car isn't immediately obvious (why does moving a swingarm down equate with going left?).

The real part I like, however, comes with reversing. As opposed to having to explicitly shift gears, simply turn the throttle in the opposite direction as you do to accelerate. Counter-clockwise to accelerate, clockwise to slow down, and keep turning it clockwise (through a safety stop) and you'll end up going backwards, which you can consider the extreme manifestation of slowing down (you have slowed so much you have negative forward velocity).

Odd, when I learned to drive I found this immediately obvious the first time I actually turned using a signal...

The indicator is on the left side, so if I'm making a left hand turn then my hand is moving down--the same way that the signal moves to signal left. In fact, if you are holding the wheel in the right place and extend your fingers while you are turning then your hand clicks the indicator correctly without you having to think at all. I think that, aside from the steering wheel, it's one of the most intuitive things on the car.

I agree with you about the direct connection between the user's movements and the speed, but the direction of the twist required to go forward/backward is fairly arbitrary (it seems), so it must be learned rather than 'intuited'.

As for the throttle, you're quite right - the twist direction to go forwards is arbitrary, but the rotating all the way in the opposite direction to reverse (which is what I wanted to highlight) makes much more intuitive sense to me than throttling down to zero, moving a lever, and then throttling back up again.

I found the system to be rather touchy. When coming to a stop it was quite easy to overcompensate and start oscillating back and forth. It was quite fun to drive though, and for the kind of work a bin carrier does the ability to reverse without changing gears is very useful.

Incidentally, in order to achieve this continuously adjustable drive a diesel engine runs at a constant RPM turning a hydraulic pump which in turn drives hub motors in each wheel. The whole thing makes a very distinctive sound as it drives around.

http://www.shakermaker.com/bin-carrier-images.php

A better option is an auto-canceling turn signal which I'm sure too expensive, for now. Until then, for either design, the suck is going to depend on finger/thumb size.