The Alert Audit

A close reading of one real dashboard's full alert vocabulary, and a judgement on how well its parts hang together

Due: 19 March 2027 · Weight: 20%

The brief#

Take one dashboard you can actually look at — your own car, a family member’s, a manual, or a well-documented reference vehicle — and catalogue every way it talks to its driver.

By week 4 you have covered needles, lights and icons: three different grammars for saying “something is true right now.” Most dashboards mix all three without much apparent plan, because they were designed in stages, by different suppliers, years apart. This assessment asks you to make that history visible.

A strong audit is not a spec sheet. Naming every warning light in the owner’s manual is the easy half. The harder half is judging whether the vocabulary this vehicle uses is internally consistent: does red always mean the same thing, does a chime always outrank a light, does an icon ever contradict what the equivalent text message would have said? Vehicles fail this test more often than manufacturers would like.

What you submit#

A written audit (1,200–1,800 words, or an equivalent structured document) with:

• a table or catalogue of every alert on the chosen dashboard: gauge, light, icon, chime, or message, with its channel and its assumed audience knowledge
• at least one specific inconsistency, named and explained — not “the dashboard could be clearer” but “the low-tyre-pressure icon and the low-tyre-pressure chime disagree about how urgent this is”
• a photo, screenshot, or clearly labelled diagram of the dashboard you audited, so a marker can check your catalogue against the real thing

Declare which vehicle you used and how you accessed it (in person, owner’s manual, manufacturer documentation) in a one-line note at the top.