The Kia “infotainment” system’s radio looks like this:
You can use the buttons on the steering wheel to change radio stations. Pressing moves you down the list. Pressing moves you up the list. Very convenient. But a problem: if you’re on any other screen (home, navigation, whatever) than the radio, the stations don’t cycle in the right order. It was driving me batty before I figured it out.
Loyal reader, can you figure it out?
Hint: I eventually realized that the stations weren’t cycling randomly. They were cycling backwards.
Solution: When the radio isn’t open, the software stops caring about the visual representation and only cares about the preset NUMBER. So moves you down the list (from P1 to P2 to P3) and moves you up the list (from P3 to to P2 to P1).
I figured it out a year ago and I still fuck it up every time I try to change stations.
That’s the problem, innit? If I were just staring at the screen I would always know which menu I was on and would have less problems. Instead it’s like Schrödinger’s Radio, where the station I want to cycle to exists simultaneously in both directions until I try one and observe the change.
This kind of thing that drives me crazy. It’s like nothing ever goes through testing to catch errors of that sort.
On my iPad the bookmarks suddenly stopped presenting properly. A couple of weeks ago, for no reason apparent to me, all of my bookmarks in Firefox were suddenly shunted into a sub-menu. Now I have to make an extra click every time to access them. Add to that, Firefox used to return to whichever sub-menu you had just used to select a bookmark. Not anymore - now it sends you to the top menu every time.
Intentional? I don’t know. But there seems to be no way to change that behavior so… garbage design.
I was going to guess that up/down cycled based on station frequency instead of position on the list.
Looks like I need to patent that before car makers get a hold of the idea.
It reminds me of scroll wheel behavior when zooming in and out. Here I am, happily using various apps and scrolling in and out (gaming, maps, etc.) then suddenly I encounter an app in which everything is the reverse.
Sure, I can usually change this behavior in settings, but I must ask why they didn’t check to see the most common expected behavior before implementing their design? As if the programmer’s own preference, even if different from the majority, is the only thing that mattered.
moves you down the list. Pressing 
moves you up the list. Very convenient. But a problem: if you’re on any other screen (home, navigation, whatever) than the radio, the stations don’t cycle in the right order. It was driving me batty before I figured it out.