Stop! You're doing it all wrong

When I was a kid I was sometimes allowed to wash the car. This normally consisted of a bucket of water with washing up liquid for bubbles and a sponge. I would wash the car with the sponge and then when I thought I was done, I would throw the contents of the bucket over the car to help rinse off the suds. Sometimes, I would use a hose to rinse the car off and that was that.

As I grew up and had my own cars to wash, I progressed a bit. Eventually I discovered that washing up liquid contains a lot of salt so I started using proper car wash shampoo and I moved on to using a shammy leather to dry the car after washing it. 

Recently however, I've started to get seriously into car cleaning and polishing and I discovered that I'd been cleaning my cars all wrong and that really surprised me. Once you understand the logic behind it all then it does make sense. 

I need to explain the correct way to wash a car so I can explain what I was doing wrong but first I need to show what the problem was with washing the car badly in the first place. With any modern car, the paint is very durable but not invulnerable. Washing and polishing the car badly will cause major paint damage over a period of time and this damage can only be repaired a certain number of times.

This photo (which I've borrowed from CleanYourCar.co.uk with their kind permission) shows the sorts of scratches that often exist on the car’s paint. The rear of the panel in the photo has already been polished which is why it looks new compared to the front part of the panel.

You can read the full article about how that car was cleaned and the paint issues corrected here. Even if you're not into polishing cars like I am, you can scroll through the photos as they tell most of the story.

So, if you really don't care about how to wash a car and just want to get to the point of the article then please skip to Is there a point to this article?.

Cleaning a car properly.

I must preface this by saying that this is not intended to be an exhaustive article – it's just some basic steps that illustrate my point.

The first thing you need to do is either hose or preferably jet-wash the car down. This removes any surface grit and loose dirt which will improve the quality of the wash later. I certainly did this in more recent years.

Once the loose dirt is washed off, the proper washing starts. At this point, you need to use 2 buckets of water – one for clean water and one for dirty – more on that shortly. Also, you should never use a sponge as a sponge will collect all of the surface dirt that was on the car and will hold it on the surface of the sponge. Rinsing will get rid of some of that dirt but a surprising amount stays on the surface of the sponge. This means that during the course of washing the car, the sponge effectively becomes a brillo pad!

Instead of a "normal" sponge, you should use a microfibre "noodle" sponge or wash mitt (something like this). This type of wash mitt has tentacles that effectively give you a much larger surface area and the dirt has a lot less chance of scratching the car.

Now, in terms of the two buckets, you need one bucket with clean water in it (this will be the "dirty" bucket) and one with clean water and the car shampoo. A lot of "proper" car shampoo is ph neutral and specially formulated to not remove any existing wax from the car. If you clean and wax your car properly then the finish should last months with only rinsing and drying needed in between.

The thing to do is to wash the car by dipping the wash mitt into the top couple of inches of the dirty bucket to wash off any debris – going too deep into the bucket risks collecting dirt that hasn't sunk properly yet. It's best not to stir the dirty bucket either for the same reason.

Once you've rinsed the wash mitt with the dirty bucket, then dip it into the clean bucket and wash the the car. If you do this correctly, you will be amazed at how different the water in the clean and dirty buckets is at the end of the wash!

In terms of actually washing the car – again, it's just common sense but you should start at the top of the vehicle and go around it in bands. I tend to do the whole roof first, then the windows and any roof pillars, then the bonnet and top of wings and to the same height down the side of the car. I normally leave the back of the car until last in this bit because that is normally more dirty than other parts of the car at the same height. I’ll then go around in another 2 bands washing the progressively more dirty parts of the car as I get lower down rinsing the wash mitt frequently as I go.

The benefit of this pattern is that it means I'm going from the cleanest part of the car to the dirtiest. Again, the goal is to minimize the dirt that gets onto the wash mitt or other parts of the car.

Once I'm done with the washing then I'll rinse the soap off the car with a hose or jet wash and then finally dry the car but I now use a microfibre drying cloth rather than a shammy leather for the same reasons that I don't use a sponge.

After that point, there are literally dozens of products and techniques that can be used to polish and shine the car but they're beyond the scope of this article. If you know me then you will know I’ll happily bore you to death about this stuff in person!
 
Is there a point to this article?

Well, I'm glad you asked – of course there is!

The point is that if I (and thousands of other people) are washing cars wrong then how many other things are we doing wrong? Once you understand the logic to washing a car, it makes a lot of sense but too often we don't stop to think about the best way to doing things – we just do them that way because we always have.

If I'd wanted to wash my car better, I could have just looked at what I was doing and added a better shampoo or something else but that wouldn't have solved the problems. I needed to forget what I thought I knew and start from the beginning.

As I've mentioned before, forgetting what you think you know and working out the best way to do something is not the approach that's taken most of the time which is a shame because it's often the better way to get results.

When did volume get a number?

Recently I sat in the newly launched Range Rover in a showroom and had a play with the in-car entertainment system. These days there are lots and lots of cars out there that have large screen displays in the console to control all manner of in-car systems from radio and CD to navigation, iPod connectivity/etc.

One thing about the Range Rover system puzzled me and I thought it was bad User Interface (UI) design. As is normal, the volume control is a separate rotary control that you turn anti-clockwise to lower the volume and clockwise to increase the volume. When I changed the volume, a large box appeared over everything else on the touch screen with a number to represent the volume. The problem was that this box stayed on the screen for what felt like 3-4 seconds during which time I couldn't do anything else on the screen which I found annoying. It’s probably less of an issue in real use (i.e. when you’re driving and not sitting still playing with the new system) but it did get me thinking.

I tried to think about when volume got a number attached to it and I've got an idea of how it happened. Once upon a time, turning the volume up or down on something (like a radio) resulted in the sound getting louder or quieter and that was all you needed to judge the level of volume.

Then someone invented the TV remote control. These were originally very primitive devices that often only had 4 buttons - channel up and down and volume up and down. The problem that this presented was that people needed a way to see that the buttons they were pressing were having the desired effect. This was easy with channels because the picture would change but with volume, that might be a little more subtle and so the on-screen numbers to indicate the level of volume was born.

That seems to have persevered ever since and there are lots of things that now have a number to indicate the level of volume but is that always sensible or necessary? I currently have a BMW which doesn't give me any indication that the volume has changed. Instead it relies on my trusting the fact that I twisted a control or pressed a button and it adjusts the volume accordingly and honestly, I've never had any problem with it at all - I've never even given it a second thought until I wrote this article.

The fact that the new Range Rover’s in-car systems put the volume in my way enough to make me think about it proves that it’s bad UI design. There were a lot of places on the screen where a discreet volume level indicator would fit perfectly (even if it was a number) but because I’m actually touching the control to make the adjustment - is an indicator really necessary?

When designing UI elements it is vital to question everything and make sure whatever you are adding provides real value. As a poster my wife bought me for Christmas says “just because we've always done it that way doesn't mean it’s not incredibly stupid” and in a similar way, even if it’s “new and impressive” - if there’s no justification for it then it’s still stupid!

Simon on: Wasting time

It’s odd that, in an era when we are more time-poor than ever, we are using technology to come up with ever more sophisticated ways to waste time. Take social media as an example. I’m not a great Twitter user and only follow 12 other users, mostly trade magazines. Even so, my Twitter feed of yesterday included 172 tweets with fewer than 9% of any interest.

What of Facebook? Again, I’m not a heavy user but there were 73 threads on my Facebook page of which 23% were of interest. I opened only 40% of my emails: the rest, including those in the Junk folder, were deleted unread. Of those I opened, 10% were from LinkedIn but I probably only clicked on three or four stories of which, possibly two were of real interest. I still feel compelled to go through all the headings just in case.

It seems the price of all the benefits of instantaneous communication is time spent shovelling all the dross out of our computer systems. Maybe one day somebody will come up with a program that can monitor everything that comes through and be taught to filter out the useless stuff from every source.

Whoever comes up with that will make a fortune.

Originally published in Conference News