In an era where the automobile industry is increasingly driven by technology and data, it’s easy to forget that the automobile is a human creation, designed and defined by us. Today, the decision-making process in car manufacturing has largely been handed over to marketing and big data, leading to trends that may not resonate with all consumers. One such trend is the shift towards integrating all dashboard functions into the multimedia system’s screen.
Contrary to this trend, stepping into a modern Aston Martin feels less like a journey back in time and more like a sophisticated act of defiance against the norm. Aston Martin’s cabins, brimming with buttons, are a testament to the brand’s commitment to considering a very human factor: patience.
Miles Numburger, Head of Design at Aston Martin, and his team decided to test their models under real-use conditions, focusing on their experience as users. They examined how each vehicle function was accessed and the time it took to activate it or adjust its settings.
Through this experiment, they discovered the frustration caused by a function not being immediately available, while other less crucial functions could be comfortably relocated to one of the central screen’s menus. This led to the development of what Aston Martin internally refers to as the ‘Piss Factor’, or the frustration factor.
“When you want something, you want it right away. If you want to turn the volume up or down or control the temperature, the moment you have to go to a screen and touch it to do it, you’ve lost the customer. You’ve failed in the user experience,” explains Numburger. However, this doesn’t mean they advocate for an endless array of buttons: “Now we have started to really design an experience for the user, for the client. Before it was not like that, we simply added the button because it was necessary.”
When designing the cabin of the new Aston Martin Vantage, this very human and orthodox factor was applied through a simple rule: if a button, for whatever reason, is bothersome, it is removed. The result is a dashboard reminiscent of a fighter jet, where everything we could need is just a touch away.
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