Broken: Car door icon

I believe the entire icon (slanted part included) is a car door.

And UNLOCK/LOCK would be english-centric, no? Not viable in the global economy of car sales, it would seem.

Mike: everything else in the car is printed in English: radio, AC, speedometer (which is printed in American-centric miles per hour), etc... so language isn't the reason.

Legibility may stop the words being printed. I'd guess that UNLOCK/LOCK button was a little bigger than the one you show.

Also many modern cars will auto-lock the doors when you drive off, rendering this button mostly useless.

Funnily enough I don't have any trouble seeing that it is an icon of a car door with a lock on it, thereby presuming it locks/unlocks the door.

Ohh and the stuff that is printed in English - is that only on the main console (the dials)? If so then it is ONE part to be replaced by language variants, these buttons are usually... on doorrests? another component to worry about perhaps?

Yes, I would agree. The slanted part is the window portion of the car door.

I don't see why they can't have an open padlock and a closed padlock as the icons. Those would be pretty robust for international use.

I agree, completely broken. But I've also rented some Fords that have an even more broken design: a toggle-type switch protrudes from the door...pressed one way, a black wedge sticks out. Pressed another way, the wedge has a white triangular label. Now we must decipher if white means locked or unlocked. For some reason, I always guess that it means unlocked (white being empty or open, vs. black being full or closed).

Of course, I'm wrong, which I discover when I test whether the door is locked or not.

It's as though Ford is saying you have to test the door to make sure it's locked, because we can't be bothered to make a door lock that can tell you that clearly.

It is a car door outline. The icon is on almost all cars outside the US.

I'll play devil's advocate and suggest that it's NOT broken, by virtue of being on the inside of the car.

When you're inside the car, you tend to put your key in the ignition. You CAN'T use your keys to lock or unlock the car when you're inside.

Wish I knew the technical term for the little knob-like thing that have been used to lock and unlock car doors for decades (http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/?id=264236&refnum=270747). Maybe that's the lock itself. In any event, most people are used to lifting that up to unlock a door, push it down to lock it.

Using that same up-down logic, the button says "I'm for locking and unlocking your car, not opening your windows. Don't get me confused with the other buttons nearby that control the power windows." The key icon signifies the purpose of the button, separating it from other similar buttons for the windows. There even seems to be a small finger-sized indent to make it easier to press. Up to unlock, and down to lock, both actions identical to how you'd work a car door lock from the inside.

I tend to get tripped up on this one because now such things as "window locks" exist - for the kiddies in the back seat. When I see the symbol above, I get that it locks something on the door - but I'm not sure if that's the window or the door itself.

Actually, I understand this icon, though I agree the open and closed padlock icon makes more sense. The control that ALWAYS confuses me is the "vent" button. When the light is ON, the vent is CLOSED. That always seems backwards to me.

yes, i could never unlock my doors for passengers until i stopped paying attention to the symbol!

Even though you disagree, Mark, I'd still say that the reason is language.

I agree with you that the icon stinks, but the reason why you don't use English is because of the desire to make the car as universal as possible. The words "Radio", "CD", "A/C", red for heat, and blue for cold are universal enough that you can get away with not changing them.

The speedometer and HUD usually have to change by law. So the car companies are obligated to make that adjustment in design. I'm sure they wouldn't if they didn't have to.

So that leaves the switch we're talking about -- and that's important to note: it's not just a button. It's a switch with a whole backing component that probably costs something like $2.00 to make.

Given that, I'm sure that they prefer to make one of them rather than several different kinds at a higher price.

Moreover, once you add several different switches for different languages, you add complication to the manufacturing process: you need to set up your production line to customize the car even further for english and non-english language switches. Or decide that you don't care about the non-english-speaking customers.

I think the best design is one of the oldest: a simple up down button. The newer versions of this button are so very intuitive: when the button is down, it's flush, implying everything is okay. When it's up, it's not flush, indicating it should be pushed down to make things okay (i.e., safe for driving...locked).

I think the problem is that the marketing types figured that a padlock had the wrong connotations... old technology or, worse, jail. So they looked for something cool rather than intelligible. This wouldn't be the first time.

If everything else in the car is English but somehow the doorlock icon needs to be visual only, for whatever reason, then yes - why not use the padlock icon?

If not the padlock, then SOMETHING must work better than the current design. At least put the key where it unlocks the door!

Are you sure this isn't the "rear doors child-safe lock" toggle? The thing that prevents children from unlocking their doors from inside? I have seen a couple of those that look much like this.

Totally sure.

I think this icon and button are actually the Window lock buttons, not the door lock icons. This button is typically only on the driver side and will allow or disallow the rest of the passengers to control their own windows. Useful for when kids are in the back seat.

Given that functionality, I think the icon imagery is just fine.

It's the door lock, not the window lock. I know it's hard to believe, given how bad the design is, but it really and truly is the door lock design.

I have nearly this exact same icon on my car door and I always second guessed which side to press if I wanted to unlock all the doors. Finally I taught myself that the "empty" part = unlock. So, it was the lack of an image that helped me remember which side to press. After all, I rarely need to manually the doors since they lock automatically. However, my Civic doors never unlock without my say-so.

I'm getting really sick of icons. The more they are used on everything, the less they make sense to me. I understand the practicality of it, but they are so rarely well-designed and meaningful.

I, too, always saw it as a slanted thing with no meaning -- and not a door. (It's like one of those things where one person sees an old lady's profile and another sees a butterfly.) I'm sure childhood issues are involved with why one person sees one thing.

I drove a used Saab in high school, and none of the buttons made any sense. In fact (and I hate to admit this), I didn't even know I had a rear window windshield wiper until the second year I owned the car. I stumbled upon this discovery by hitting a combination of two mystery buttons that, until then, I had referred to as the "ejector seat" and "oil slick" buttons. (Crazy Swedes.)

But now I drive an Isuzu, and love it. I think it's one of the most underrated vehicles on the market. My Rodeo door lock button has both the stupid icon and the words "lock" and "unlock." In other words, Isuzu is on the fence. They included the international symbol for "door with giant key painted on side," but also listed, in English, what each side of the button does for the user.

If we could all just live like the Duke brothers, we wouldn't have this dilemma.

The key obviously means that you have to put a giant key in the side of the door and then push the button to get it to unlock.

I agree this is broken, but I think it's broken because of the confusion with the window up/down controls. In cars that have this control, I *always* mistake it for the window. After a couple of years of locking myself into my friends' cars, I'm forced to conclude that there's something deeply unintuitive about this icon.

My Nissan has a padlock thing for the door lock.

I was on a trip to Mexico recently and it took forever to figure out how to lock the back doors on the Ford Fiesta I rented. I had to take it back to the renter to ask them how to lock them. There was no button or mark on the door anywhere, or any sort of button in the back seat. Turns out you were supposed to lock the doors by jamming the handle against the door.

This is annoying, yes, but more annoying is the fact that my Subaru has this button, backwards. It does the opposite - or, I guess, it does what the OP expected it to do. Infuriating, once you've learned the way other companies do it, to have to *unlearn*.

Keys can lock and unlock a door, and anyways if you didn't want it English you could standardize a lock symbol and unlocked lock symbol which is used on some things as well so it would be clear. I guess if you wanted to, you could add your own labels after you bought the car