passengers) tension while driving, you could now focus on traffic and your environment knowing your TomTom would alert you to each turn in time. Even male drivers have been reported to now occasionally have a few brain cycles left to follow what everybody else in the car is chatting about. In other words, here’s a complete revolution of your emotional experience of driving somewhere unfamiliar.

Its real potential unfolded for me, though, when we recently moved to San Diego. It’s hard to imagine the stress this saves you driving around an unknown city in a different country. It also quickly becomes hard to remember how much of a hassle it all was before. In fact, TomTom offers special computer voices with “I told you we should have taken that exit”-style instructions, should you miss that part of the classic driving experience.

Courtesy of Tom Tom

Of course there are still plenty of usability problems that make you scratch your head, wondering just what the designers were thinking. City or street names are listed so close below each other that you keep

selecting wrong ones—Fitts’ law at work. I also got a furious call when my sweetheart first tried using it: Köln (Cologne) wasn’t in the city list. It turned out TomTom had left out German umlauts from their onscreen keyboards, but forgot to include the standard transcriptions in their search algorithms; unable to type Köln, she’d entered Koeln, but the system was expecting Koln, not even listing the city as a close match otherwise. Dudes, localization.

Oh, and turning it on is a nightmare. Pressing the tiny, half-sunken power button briefly is happily ignored, but keep pressing it a couple times at the wrong moment and it won’t turn on at all. Protecting against inadvertent operation is fine, but have these people ever heard of the inherent evil of time-based interactions, or of at least providing appropriate feedback when they’re unavoidable? A short “Thank you, starting up, you can let go now” beep would

have done the trick. But then again, no one with the slightest case of arthritis in their fingers will ever be able to press that button, so with our aging population the company will soon run out of customers anyway.

But I’m sure these issues
will be fixed. My point is that

Tom Tom has crossed—no,
jumped across—the “threshold
of indignation,” as Paul Saffo
put it in Terry Winograd’s great
book, Bringing Design to Software.
The usefulness of the device by
far outweighs
the