RAM 1500: Top Three Infotainment Offering, Finds Strategy Analytics

November 21, 2019

More Touchscreen Real Estate, Additional Design Flourishes & Increased Edge Length, Pushes User-friendly System to New Level

BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–$FCAU #RAM1500–A new user experience evaluation from the In-Vehicle UX (IVX) group at Strategy Analytics has assessed the 2019 version of the Ram 1500 pickup truck for the North American market. Introducing a new 12-inch portrait-style console touchscreen intended to be primarily used for FCA’s Uconnect infotainment system, the enlarged touchscreen real estate, additional design flourishes and increased edge length, stretches the boundaries of an already-user-friendly system to a new level. However, voice control remains a pain point for key media and navigation tasks.

Key report findings include:

The provided feature set including advanced navigation features and connected media options is well-suited for the North American market and Ram’s target segment.
Designers have taken advantage of the large touchscreen real estate to provide large touch targets. The additional clever use of edges and corners for higher-use targets instead of buttons – which could be considered distracting or uncomfortable ergonomically – shows that the driving use case was well-considered during development.
Top tasks are easily surfaced throughout the menu structure. Moreover, a search bar is provided front-and-center in the satnav menu, matching users’ expectations for the feature.

Derek Viita, Senior Analyst and report author commented, “Despite the many benefits of the new design of this system, voice recognition in the Ram 1500 can merely be described as satisfactory, but nevertheless still on-par with other high-volume systems. As we have found previously, consumers have growing affinity for voice-based assistants outside the car and their expectations have long outpaced development for in-car voice systems.”

Continued Viita, “While phone tasks overall were accomplished with ease during this benchmark, many others relied on unintuitive phrases to trigger tasks – and this was most problematic with tasks such as changing media or entering a destination.”

Added Chris Schreiner, Director, Syndicated Research UXIP, “But pain-points with voice recognition aside, the redesign of this system in addition to the inclusion of a wide variety of connected features, many which leverage SiriusXM’s Travel Link, makes Uconnect one of the strongest offerings on the market with regard to on-board infotainment. As such, the Ram 1500 sits within the top three infotainment systems benchmarked by Strategy Analytics in the last eight years.”

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About In-vehicle UX

Our In-vehicle User Experience (IVX) service investigates UX innovation opportunities in the connected vehicle. By understanding the emerging behaviors, needs, motivations, use cases, pain-points and “must-have” experiences of lead adopters and future target consumers, IVX delivers a roadmap to help you design the optimal experience. IVX forms part of the User Experience Innovation Practice (UXIP) at Strategy Analytics. Through both syndicated and proprietary user-centric research capabilities, UXIP delivers strategic insights and analysis on how to optimize the user experience of new and emerging technologies. Click here for more information.