One occupational hazard of being a game developer is that you become acutely aware of how problems you have to solve go fundamentally unsolved in other products that are held to a less competitive standard.  A key case in point I encountered today -- the onboard GPS navigation system I recently upgraded to in my car.

There are a number of pretty straighforward UI flaws that seem like they have pretty straight analogs to problems we face in game UI design.  For example, hiding the display of the "points of interest" is done with a button called "delete" even though it isn't really deleting anything.  You can easily put the interface mode in different states with no apparent way to reset it without leaving the nav app altogether and going back in.   There are huge lists of categories that require 3-4 deep menu navigation that don't support multiselect or group select, despite those being very natural touchscreen UI metaphors.

I'm not adventurous enough to try and mod in a different UI for my car's GPS system, but it does make me wonder a bit about the process.  I know that for most of the car's design, they work for years on really improving the design of the controls and interiors, but it naively seems to me that just about any UI designer worth their salt in the games industry would be able to identify problems like these quite readily. 

Maybe it's just hubris, but sometimes I think good game development has got to be one of the most challenging in terms of requiring a wide array of cross disciplinary skills.