I am working on an In Vehicle Infotainment System. This is one particular use case I am finding difficult to think in terms of UX :
There is an IVI system attached in car which can take commands over Internet.
User sitting in the back has a smart phone with a particular App installed that sends commands to the car over Internet.
IVI system can move the windows up or down based on the command.
I have to decide how the UI in the Phone should look like. I thought of a slider kind UI like this. User can slide them up or down to slide the Car windows up or down.
Problem :
Commands travel as follows:
- Phone UI to central server through Internet
- Central server to respective car IVI through Internet
- IVI to the actual car control unit through CAN protocol
- Window actually slides
This takes considerable time to complete.
So the speed with which user actually slides in UI is not really shown onto the actual windows behavior. It just doesn't feel intuitive to do.
In fact there need to be back updates to the APP if someone manually changes the window height, which just complicates it more.
Can someone provide some feedback about how I could proceed ?
In general how would UX designers approach the problem when there is a delay in what user can do and the time in which the change actually takes place ?
If someone could quote some similar problem statement/solution in other real world scenario also would be great.
Edit : Rationale behind this feature
- Assume you went to some shopping mall. While shopping you realize you might have forgotten to close your windows. In that case, instead of going out and confirming the same, user can just take his phone out and see if window is actually closed or not, and close if required.
Yes, I agree that in this case user would just need a 'CloseAllWindows' kind of button instead of sliding the window to some specific height. But we went on to provide the sliding part as well, just in case for the 'Geeky' ones out there :P
[ Beat this for a rationale : Switching a bulb Big Bang Theory Way ]
Moreover, its not just that this App do only sliding the window up/down. It gives you complete view and control of the car as such. Remote lock/unlock and what not, but Alas, everything with a considerable delay.
Thus, my question was rather in general terms, how UX engineers design when there is a mismatch in what user can do with the UI and how fast the response is visible in the system.