License+, a new driver program from Automatic, is built on communication, not consequences. Automatic
If we can be real for a moment, it is maybe a little insane that we let 16-year-olds drive. Teenagers crash cars a lot, and it’s hard to imagine today’s panoply of harmless-seeming smartphone distractions making new drivers any safer. Of course, you can’t mention this to a 16-year-old, because God, Mom, I passed the driving test, didn’t I? The government trusts me so why don’t you? That gets to what’s smart about Automatic’s new driver program. It doesn’t try to catch youngsters being bad drivers. It just gives them a chance to prove they’re being good ones.
License+ comes as an update to the Automatic app, available today. It lets new drivers enroll in a 100-hour program, using the company’s http://ift.tt/1wwioQG">car-tracking dongle to give drivers a score based on behavior like observing the speed limit and braking properly. In addition to supplying new drivers with the app’s standard audio feedback, License+ also has badges and medals for various safe driving achievements, like racking up 20 hours of highway driving, or going 10 days without slamming on the brakes.
Parents only get abstracted GPS data on their web dashboard. Automatic
The most noteworthy thing about the program is the way it flips the model for this sort of thing on its head. Parents understandably like the idea of tracking their kids behind the wheel, and most products have been based on this sort of monitoring approach. When Automatic talked to parents about what they were looking for in a new driver product, more than a few made it clear they were interested in NSA-level surveillance.
But Automatic didn’t think that’s really what parents wanted. “The reason people say monitoring is because that’s what’s on the shelves, that’s what people know,” says Steve Bishop, the designer who led the development of License+. What parents really desired, the company suspected, was a way to make sure their kids were learning how to drive responsibly.
To this end, tracking and monitoring systems can be detrimental. These punitive products make for an adversarial relationship between new drivers and their parents. Worse, they’re designed for parents, not drivers. “They often don’t address the teen at all. They’re completely left out of the equation,” Bishop says.
Automatic wanted to do something different. “The big insight was to focus on communication rather than consequences,” Bishop says. That meant creating something that would be attractive to teens and their parents alike.
Drivers can earn badges and medals for various skills and achievements. Automatic
You can see this approach in the way License+ treats parents and drivers differently. Teens, for example, get access to fine-grained GPS data through Automatic’s smartphone app. Parents only get to review the data through a web dashboard, where it’s abstracted to the city-level. In other words, the software still offers an overview of activity behind the wheel, but it won’t let parents bust their young driver for being at a girlfriend’s house when they said they were at band practice. “We want to treat the teens the same way we do with adults and give them a modicum of privacy,” Bishop says.
This is a small but powerful design decision. Automatic’s dongle offers an unprecedented level of detail on drivers’ activity, but in this case, the company’s designers realized that withholding some of that data was the only way to get the interaction they wanted. Similar thinking informed the 100-hour time frame for the program. Automatic could’ve let parents set this number themselves, or they could’ve made it so that youngsters had to stay under the program’s yoke until certain achievements were garnered, but instead, they intentionally opted for a hard stop. It serves both parties.
“The parent knows they’ve got 100 hours to coach their teen,” Bishop says. “But the teen knows this isn’t forever.”
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