SIEMENS

A ccording to a Russian proverb, wisdom and simplicity get along well. This was clearly no secret for legendary aerospace engineer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, who ushered in the age of space flight with Sputnik 65 years ago. “The genius of a design lies in its simplicity,” he said.

This credo is also guiding researchers at Siemens Corporate Technology (CT) as they deal with the issue of usability. Today, hardly any Siemens product reaches the market without having been tested in this respect. Siemens’ teams of user-experience specialists, including engineers, designers, and psychologists, test electric cars, visit power plants, stand next to physicians in the operating room, and invite test subjects to try out applications (apps) and Internet pages — all with the aim of making products as easy as possible to use.

How can a product be both highly complex and yet easy to use? “Simple,” says Anke Richter. “You just have to think like a user.” Richter, a psychologist, works at CT’s Usability Laboratory in Munich, and her job is to find out what the user needs, when, and under which circumstances. Her focus is on the car of the future, and electric mobility is her specialty.

In addition to being environmentally friendly, comfortable, and quiet, the electric car of tomorrow will offer much more. Special software will link it to charging stations, parking spaces, and traffic management centers. It will charge itself and automatically pay recharging and parking fees. Furthermore, it will not only store electricity, but feed it back into the power grid when needed, earning money in the process.

“Until now, people have read their electricity meters once a year and been regularly shocked by the bill,” says Dr. Heinz Martin Scheurer, head of CT’s Usability Department. “In the future, you’ll be able to use an app on a smartphone to see how much money you’ve earned by feeding power into the grid and how much you have to pay.”

Some of these features are already available. Electric cars that are compatible with recharging stations, billing stations, and the electrical grid already exist in some areas. Pioneers of electromobility, such as Siemens employee Klaus Orsolleck, are testing the new cars to see how fit they are for daily use and which features still need improvement. For example, one thing that Orsolleck noticed — and passed on to Richter — was that it’s difficult to tell whether his electric car is charging at any given time, because the small blue charging display is hidden up front under the radio in the dashboard. And at charging stations there’s still no indication of how much power a vehicle has stored.

In any event, Orsolleck would like to be able to check the charging process from work or take a quick peek while shopping. He’d also like the option of remotely choosing either inexpensive, environmentally friendly power or a fast-charge mode, in case he suddenly needs the car sooner than expected.

Richter incorporated these preferences into her design for the new charging app for Android smartphones, and Orsolleck is trying it out in a usability test. At the moment, he’s sitting behind a glass panel in a Siemens lab in Munich. A usability expert sitting next to him is giving him a task to complete: “You’ve driven to a charging station at the company parking lot, and you’d like to fully charge your car as inexpensively as possible while you work. You’d be willing to accept a longer charging time for that. What do you do?”

Using an icon on the smartphone, Orsolleck launches the phone’s eMobility Manager. A window opens, and he can now select a charging station. So far everything has been very intuitive. Then a window with charging options appears: “Fast,” “Profile” (user-defined), and the inexpensive green “Eco” electricity. Orsolleck chooses the latter. With the three slide controls underneath the options, he can adjust the charging time, the charge level in kilometers, and the cost. While using the app, Orsolleck comments on each individual step as the usability expert notes any hesitation, no matter how small. In a new window, under “Advanced Options,” Orsolleck selects “Allow reverse feed” and taps on his “Preferred energy mix: water, wind, solar.” Meanwhile, a camera films every movement of his hand and a program records every click as he uses the app. With this procedure, experts at the lab can carefully analyze the user’s behavior.

Detecting Habits. “Focusing on the user isn’t enough by itself,” says Richter. “All of the associated elements, scenarios, and participants in the charging, parking and billing infrastructure have to be understood and included.” To that end, she paid a visit to the Harz Model Region, a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and the Federal Ministry for the Environment. Renewable sources of energy contribute more than 60 percent of the power supply in the Harz region. She accompanied drivers of electric cars throughout the region in order to study their habits, such as when, where, and how they charge their cars. She watched a mobility provider in a control room, looked at the entire charging infrastructure, and observed a parking garage operator who was considering whether to invest in charging stations. In discussions with experts, she worked out how charging stations could be reserved through a Web portal and what access rights would be needed.

From these observations, she figured out which features users want to see displayed on their app when they charge their cars and which functions have to run in the background. “This is the key issue,” she says. The driver doesn’t have to see a charging curve; it’s enough if a “charging profile” negotiated by the car with the charging station is running in the background. What’s important for the user is that he can see the battery’s current state of charge from anywhere by using a mobile app and that he knows how long it will take to complete the charging process. From the materials she studied, Richter and her colleagues created an interactive model that formed the basis of the prototype that Orsolleck was allowed to test.

Richter says that it’s important, especially with innovative products, to ensure that everything you can conceive of technically is visualized in prototypes early on so that it conforms with the behavior of potential users. “If you don’t do that, all you have in the end is technology, and you don’t know whether it will be accepted by customers,” says Scheurer. But if people and technology are coordinated, errors can be reduced and effort can be spared. In other words, efficiency increases.

However, features are often simply lined up in a row, particularly in software development and user interface design. “And that,” says Richter, “is like attaching the handle to the spout on a coffeepot. Theoretically, all the features are there to enable you to lift the pot and pour the coffee, but they are in the wrong places.” In any case, compared with the situation ten years ago, user interface design — in other words, the way software appears outwardly to the user — is now accorded much more importance and is quickly becoming an increasingly significant competitive factor, adds Scheurer.

Gestures Instead of Clicks. Although it’s becoming easier and easier to write software, the information and features offered to the user through software are becoming increasingly complex. Experts at Siemens’ Usability Laboratory therefore focus on software-user interfaces. This can really pay off. For instance, Siemens’ Syngo.via imaging software was honored with the iF Design Award in 2010. The software helps doctors to accelerate patient appraisals and improves the efficiency of clinical management.

At the moment, the “mouse generation” is still dominant, says Scheurer. But in the future, he expects multi-touch control — the detection of several fingers on a touch display — to become increasingly widespread. And those looking even farther into the future are imagining systems that can be controlled through voice commands, gestures, glances, or even “brain computing,” where the system registers a user’s thought processes via EEG measurement. In fact, Siemens has already developed a gesture control system for the operating room.

Meanwhile, Klaus Orsolleck is imagining what it will be like, maybe ten years from now, to conveniently control his electric car from his couch. “The app on the smartphone will automatically synchronize with my Outlook calendar and tell the car when it’s time to recharge. Half an hour before departure, my car will not only be fully charged but also warmed up.” Nothing could be simpler.