Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
motorauthority.com
motorauthority.com
As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps). Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
> phones and tablets are familiar, so too should in-vehicle touchscreens.
This too is so weird to me. I get that you want users to recognize an interface. And that it should mimic how you use other things. But at least put them in context.
I hope other brands start following Mazda again for this choice.
Next to that, my car has a system where you choose 1 letter and only the next possibility pops up. It decreases the need of a full keyboard. It's quite likely you only need to choose the first 3 to 4 letters.
Nearly every phone I see has a protector around it, destroying the nice looking design because one drop and it breaks. But you still need to have shiny designed phones or you won't sell them.
So cudos to Mazda. I wonder if they can keep this policy up when everyone else has shiny large touchscreens.
This is a foolish move.
The flexibility to benefit from rapid product iteration. If you think of cars as mostly software products that receive updates over the air, a flexible interface makes a lot more sense (even though I agree that it makes for a pretty bad user interface).
I drive a car with analog controls. The buttons for controlling the radio, hazard lights, the A/C, etc are all static. I wouldn't want it to change. It gets the job done; it doesn't need iteration, and messing with it would reduce safety. I don't have to look at the controls, because the buttons are of various shapes/sizes that I know. Tactile feedback is value in keeping eyes on the road.
Compare to the cockpit of Space Shuttle: https://i.redd.it/9mj5bcbnzsx21.jpg
In terms of mission control telling you to press X button, it is almost certain that mission control would have a simulation of the cockpit running that would show them exactly what the astronaut is seeing on their display. So they will always be able to direct the astronaut correctly.
I definitely think a touch screen in this situation can be safer, because it can display information in a way that makes it quicker for the astronaut to understand the situation. It in theory requires less training because there is less requirement to remember the position and function of every single switch.
I agree with you in spirit, but would disagree with this particular point. Apollo had an erroneous "Abort" signal because a particular switch didn't do what it was supposed to, because it had some interesting failure modes in zero-gravity.
I think is dangerous to assume that one design is flawless over the other; both touch-screens and mechanical systems have their own unique failure modes. Maybe one is more reliable than the other, which I think is currently the case here.
Your mention of zero gravity has brought up another consideration for me. Assuming it's a capacitive touchscreen you need to ensure no conductive material ever floats into contact with it by mistake. Switches and buttons have covers and rails to prevent accidental pressing but how do you manage that with touchscreens? Apple manages it on your phone because a false negative is ok in that case, I don't think you can allow that on a spacecraft. How is a floating glove finger differentiated from a glove actually attached to hand?
You bring up really good points on the zero gravity considerations. It would be interesting to see SpaceX's FMEA on this system to see what all they've considered.
Even in the future world where everything is autonomous, knobs and buttons will always be needed for mission-critical interactions, whether it be driving in dangerous conditions or having to perform emergency maneuvers on your "autonomous" aircraft.
It seems that the FAA (and Garmin) does not agree with you:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8o0Nk8E0S4 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnuRFAAKdfg
I like Dynon's systems a bit more, as they have a few physical buttons to allow one to go to certain top-level / important parts of the menu system in a jiffy:
So yes, you can have cabin light and temperature controls on touchscreen on an airplane.
Which means, annoyingly, that you can be locked out of those controls during crew announcements.
[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/airbus-aims-for-a... [2] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/22729/why-are-t...
Some things are controlled by the helmet movements.
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e6311865f9688fdb18cb69...
For business, not the user.
And honestly I expect the answer is simpler: this enables them to subcontract out the UI part and run it in parallel with the development of the rest of the car, because the UI can no longer affect anything else in the car design.
Is that a genuine benefit, or one that shows up more early in planning and who's downsides show up late?
(I need a term for those cases. Psychological externality?)
You can see it a bit as a Playstation controller (or whatever platform you like), it has multiple programmable buttons. A car could basically have the same. A touch screen is not required.
The touchscreen is "lazy" in that it can defer thinking hard about your problem space and I can see why that alone would feel scary in a car.
On the other hand, there is only so much foresight you can have when you are innovating. Developing a Tesla might simply not be feasible without the flexibility a touchscreen gives you.
For me there is two different scenarii for controlling the car:
- while driving quick adjustments: volume up/volume down, temperature control, play/stop/skip music, start/stop navigation.
All of those should be via easy to understand, direct access physical controls.
- while parked (or by a passanger): navigation setting, app switching, playlist adjustments, peripherals setup, air control strategies, anything finicky really.
I see a case for these operations to be done by a touchscreen with no physical equivalent. Physical controls for those are juste hell most of the time.
In that sense, I feel Mazda is just throwing the towel when a more sensible and best of both world approach could be taken.
By default on your phone, plugged into the car, you have to swipe/unlock Android Auto, but if you're parked, you can do that, and access your apps, including Google Maps. You can set your destination, and it immediately opens on the car screen. I'm completely fine with this model of interface - when parked, use your phone.
However, having said all that, if you still want to use a wheel, it's important they hit the right UI. In a BMW I rented, the way it only showed relevant letters while searching for an address (using the wheel) was pretty good and I was able to type in an address surprisingly quickly, even on my first time of using the software. Probably still not quite as quick as using a touch screen, but close enough.
I suspect that when you allow touchscreen as your fallback, it's harder to be "really good" about making a good wheel + button UI. It's too easy to lean on your crutch.
How does this relate to Apple Magic Trackpad with Force Touch?
> Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
Given that Force Touch give a form of feedback (haptic though), isn't that good enough? How many people believe that the Force Touch gives tactile feedback instead of haptic?
I think touchscreens are dangerous as hell to have in vehicles, because you cannot operate them by feel alone, like you can with a buttons and knobs interface. People are distracted enough playing on their phones while they drive, so selfishly for my own safety, I don't really want them futzing around with the janky touchscreen display to change the radio or mess with the air conditioning too.
Worst thing is when you need a manual to understand how the thing works, and manual DOES NOT specify all the options.
I, as user, would prefer a large touch screen for changing settings and navigating, and several programmable analog buttons for when I'm driving.
Rotary controllers are evil.
pocket computer's usage scope is way broader than inside a car, and you REQUIRE the infinite UI possibility provided by a pure touch interface
I was responding to general purpose computing (smartphone) that the OP was referring to.
Or, people actually like CarPlay and Android Auto and audi would have to spend a lot of money to keep up. Newer audis already support CarPlay. They're only switching from a rotary controller to a touch screen.
Private reason: we want total voice controlled system so we can listen to everything you say & do in car, log it and get into the ad and analytics business. One step at a time well be here.
Seriously... I've seen people right here on HN claiming that "look, navigate to a touch menu, navigate to another menu, select an item, press and hold" is superior to "press one button on the door".
It is annoying as you touch it once to 'activate' it and then have to tap the screen a second time to register the press on whatever button/input you were trying to touch.
No tactile feedback and having to press it twice and visually check to make sure the input you wanted worked.
It is much more time consuming/distracting than an older vehicle in my personal experience.
Much like how a “phone” went from “a device to call someone on” to what an iPhone does today, a “car” is going from “something you drive” to just another device you interact with in various ways and it also happens to be able to get you from point A to point B.
Do they?
A car's dashboard doesn't have to be small enough to fit in your pocket; it doesn't have a screen you want to look at constantly where there's a direct trade-off between screen space and physical keyboard space; a car's dashboard doesn't have limits of where buttons can be because you have to hold it around the edges without pressing the buttons accidentally.
I still hate typing with on-screen keyboards, I just grudgingly accept that for a given small phone size, I'd prefer more of it to be screen than keyboard. That doesn't at all mean I want my car to turn into an Android tablet because I prefer a touchscreen in the constraints of a pocket size device.
The fact that they aren't going this way in the systems that __really__ matter seems to indicate that people don't really prefer touch screens.
The actual point was that when it comes to safety/critical functions, we still prefer those mechanical mechanisms. Unless you're flying or driving with your iPhone, I think the point still stands.
I think the fact that safety critical fly-by-wire systems could operate without the mechanical interface yet designers choose to do so anyway underscores this point.
Why would we port one of the compromises of the smartphone interface over to our car interface?
And yes, I know, dynamic is a trump card. It still sucks. Have you ever read Bret Victor's rant on it? http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
And Teslas ALMOST never kill their driver or innocent bystanders when the driver is negligently ignoring -- or bored and not paying attention to -- the road. There have been low speed accidents where the operator is tasked with taking over for the vehicle and they couldn't respond in time. Real life is neither a video game nor a perfect simulation. Limitations of the technology and the human operator as well as conditions of the road, lighting, and weather will always be a problem.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/01/business/insi...
2. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/05/behind-the-ub...
just another device which can kill you and others in a split second if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Tesla is already pre-selling, for money, full self-driving capability in their existing cars. And they are, of course, designing their current fleet of cars for that future. There's already a Games section in the dashboard.
We can talk about the safety aspects all day until we're blue in the face. But this is the reality.
> Tesla is already pre-selling, for money, full self-driving capability in their existing cars.
Has Tesla enabled FSD with no driver supervision?
That is the actual reality.
May I politely ask - what exactly do you learn to be a UEP (pardon the abbreviation)?
I've been using touch car interface for the last 5 years (Chevy). I basically do two things: - Bluetooth connect - listen to spotify _from_ my phone / listen to map directions _from_ my phone.
I rarely use the touch interface - I am switching tracks either using the buttons on the wheel (most of the time), or using the phone.
Also, I do not want another yet another "kind of familiar but different" interface like most of the car touch control systems. I want the interface on my phone, that's it.
The one piece of feedback I gave Toyota in their post-purchase survey is: please replace the hot mess that is Entune with CarPlay.
They absolutely should give up. You can't compete with an OS and ecosystem into which billions of dollars have been sunk.
I agree, for what it's worth, that analog controls are superior to touch controls while driving. I hate that Toyota replaced an audio dial with a touch up/down control. But the value of CarPlay is just way too high.
I agree, but I think the people building these systems are working under basically impossible conditions.
I am just speculating here, but in a car company I would think the people are mostly going to be passionate about "car stuff" (engine, driving experience, aesthetics, drive train, etc), and so the infotainment system considerations are going to take a back seat to all the things car enthusiasts care more about. This doesn't necessarily mean the people in the infotainment team themselves, but would definitely be whoever they report to, up the chain to whatever the 'product owner' equivalent is for the entire car (eg: responsible for allocating the budget). I would expect to find an attitude less like "let's make sure people buy this car because of the infotainment system" than "infotainment is tolerated as a necessary feature to sell the car to the masses".
On top of that, they have to build software that is going to be around for a couple decades with (ideally) no updates, and that basically doesn't ever crash. This means extensive testing -- maybe for over a year. For sake of discussion let's say it takes only another year to build the software: this means by the time the car is released, the platform (both hardware and any underlying software/frameworks) it's built on is basically already two years old -- and there's a good chance when the platform was picked it already wasn't cutting-edge.
This isn't meant to be a defense of bad infotainment software -- it's still bad. Give up, and focus your time on making a great CarPlay/Android Auto experience (at probably a fraction of the time currently spent). Make the FM radio and maybe bluetooth audio work standalone, then just rely on the phone integration for everything else (maps, text messages, phone dialing, contacts, etc).
Before phone integration, I might've agreed with you, or at least had no opinion on the subject.
After watching many car companies, even high-end ones like BMW and Mercedes, fail utterly at producing reasonable phone integration systems or interfaces, though, I'm all-in on CarPlay.
>It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
Correct. They have given up, and it's good that they have, because they've all proven they absolutely suck at it. In the meantime, Apple and Google (?) have done it for them, at least as far as the phone goes.
(I assume the Android equivalent is equally good; no reason it shouldn't be.)
>This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric.
I think it really IS, though.
CarPlay is amazingly good, and only really works well with a touchscreen.
At this point, it would be very hard for me to buy a car that didn't have CarPlay integration with a touchscreen. I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful.
I do agree, though, that touchscreens beyond phone interfaces should be used very sparingly. The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel.
But the phone interface is distinct from that, and needs to be a touchscreen. When it's not, or when it's not present, people just pick up their phones and use them, which is worse.
I have this. I never use it. Instead, I mount my phone next to the screen and use Android Auto on my phone. Using the rotary dial and other buttons is a) far more difficult and b) far more distracting while driving. An action that takes 1 second with a touch requires several seconds of fumbling with a knob and buttons w/out touch.
For other things, like volume adjustments, climate control, seat position, etc. I agree that physical controls that can be operated w/out visual interaction are best.
All that said, I try to use voice control whenever possible. But, that's not yet a complete solution, as Apple keeps Siri from accessing non-Apple apps (can't voice control into Pandora or Google Maps).
At this point I never use the car interface if there's CarPlay available (I usually rent cars.) The only exception is for changing car settings, which unfortunately is not exposed through in CarPlay it seems.
It always make my day when a rental car has CarPlay. And a little sad when it doesn't. Mostly because cheap rentals rarely have their own sat-nav installed and being able to use the phone on an integrated screen/audio system is really nice.
This is changing in CarPlay in iOS 13, as are a fair number of other things (generally for the better; I have a bit of hands-on experience thanks to a brave/foolhardy friend who's already installed the developer beta).
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/3/18650923/apple-carplay-ios...
Source: I do it
Otherwise, the Mazda knob works well enough. I think most of the power user complaints could be addressed by better default behavior or customization on what a scroll/click does on certain screens.
Android Auto/CarPlay is easily the most distracting system I've used. The only benefit is if I choose to be distracted while driving, it's less distracting than using my phone. Being distracted while driving is a _choice_ and sadly one that many drivers want to have.
Well, maybe the solution is to make apple carplay and android auto to work well with a dpad and buttons configuration, those interfaces have been working perfectly for videoconsoles and tvs, and a car system is more similar to that than to a phone.
Actually the system works well, and it's designed for that, And as the test confirm, using the touchscreen while driving is dangerous. The same that you can't use a video app while driving, the touchscreen should be disables while the car is moving.
It reminds me of the PSP/PSV having a touchpad on the back of the screen.
Is this a joke? I find navigating my TV's menus with a remote to be the most infuriating part of using a TV.
In my experience, the latency on cable TV boxes, Smart TVs, and in-flight entertainment systems has progressively gotten worse, not better over the years.
This latency, when coupled with a car’s touch screen is even worse.
LOLNO. Not everyone is driving alone.
I have a 2014 Mazda3, which Mazda offered Android Auto/CarPlay upgrade for a fee earlier this year and I upgraded. My car has a touchscreen, but disables all touch features above a certain speed (5 or 10 mph I think). I don't think I'm really missing anything on Android Auto without touch.
Does it also have a stupid screen that pops up every time you start the car saying, "don't use this while driving", or some such nonsense?
My Tesla allows me to adjust the AC without looking, using the scroll wheels built into the steering wheel.
I also agree that those scroll wheels are great.
My first car had dedicated buttons, which was the correct design.
My old Honda had 3 knobs on the console with the center one being larger. There was no ambiguity when you blindly groped for controls.
If there were an all-touchscreen UI (but there is not) yeah that would not be ideal as long as full self driving is not yet here.
Often, what I intend to be a tap will be interpreted as a swipe by the display. I suspect this can be attributed more to the cheap touchscreen hardware in my low trim model, than the software in Android or to the concept of touch screen interfaces.
Just as with the older analog controls, there will be good implementations and cheap implementations. It's not productive to compare well engineered, premium, apples to cheap, mass market, oranges.
Curious, do you own a car, or are you renting them?
Maybe that's why some people are such advocates for the Apple/Android interfaces: when you're driving different cars regularly it's helpful to have a consistent interface.
Meanwhile, I have never had any problem "getting used to" the various interfaces in new cars I purchase every few years.
I rent. Living centrally in a major city owning a car is more trouble than it's worth I find.
Consistency is definitely one of the prime reasons I prefer CarPlay. I feel CarPlay is really dumb, and that's a good thing. There aren't really that many things I want from my car interface, beyond temperature and music control, and navigation. Of those only the latter two would be controlled in CarPlay, and it works really well – better than any other interface I've used. It doesn't try to be fancy, have a bunch of useless animations or weird interaction. There's also no dragging anywhere, or at least not that I've seen – only simple pointing. Trying to drag a slider to change temperature in one of the newer Volvos is an absolute pain.
If I spent more than a week or two with the car, maybe I'd care to learn more about its interface, but I almost never do. So you're absolutely spot on with your reflection, at least in my case – consistency is key.
AFAIK, one of the main feature requests for Tesla is to add Android Auto. Its one of those things that is annoying to go without, once you've had it available for a while.
Google must have about 100Gb of recordings of me saying, "OK Google, no, fuck, OK beep, OK Google... fuck, what was I doing again?"
If Nissan kept recordings, they'd have several even worse recordings. Long sequences that fail on the last step are really common.
What, exactly, are you doing with your infotainment system that requires so much use? I mean, I agree, CarPlay and Android Auto are nice, but I'm only playing music and using the navigation, both of which can be done easily without the fancy software.
>Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking
It's not merely that we are used to it, it's the entire purpose of the tactile interface: allowing you to adjust things while keeping your eyes on the road.
Wow, that's an impressive knee-jerk.
First, you cast aspersions on the speaker by suggesting they're somehow using the feature too much if they care about interface efficacy.
Then you insist that key functions are done just as easily the old way, by which I presume you mean "by looking at the phone."
I'm not sure what your point is, but you're doing an admirable job at hollering at that cloud.
As someone who recently rode in a car with CarPlay and saw two young technology professionals try to use it, I disagree. One of them owned the system and drove it every day it still didn't seem like either one really understood it ("Why's it doing that?" "Maybe because ...").
I agree that all the built-in systems I've seen are terrible, but CarPlay seems like merely the "least bad" implementation at this point. If that's as good as we can do, I'd say we're still in the "research project" phase.
Nobody riding in my (ancient) car has ever had trouble finding the big red/blue knob to change the temperature, or understanding "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want". This is a solved problem.
Well, your 2006 iPod still uses a 3.5mm analog port. But that newfangled phone over there needs a new $400 Apple USB Thunderlightning Wireless Port. And your car doesn't seem to have an interface for that.
Just get one that has a constant power source (no battery), and try to plug it in to a switched power outlet so it disconnects when you shut the car off.
No.
Bluetooth is slow to change tracks, slow to pause, slow to connect, has annoying pairing issues, has lower sound quality, and is just generally subpar.
>Just get one that has a constant power source (no battery), and try to plug it in to a switched power outlet
So it's wireless, but with wires.
I rarely use either though, my car has usb and I have a 32Gb stick of music that stays in there.
Geez, can't people stop fiddling with their phones?
They've become like a kind of soother, a techno nanny that people can't do without.
The sooner people put those things down, the better off we'll be.
Guess we should go back to paper maps and listening to AM radio.
How about not reading messages while you're driving? And why do you have to write messages while in traffic? Can't this wait?
I thought I had read a study about talking to people in your car versus drinking, but here's a similar one with talking on a phone versus being drunk: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16884056/
It's hard to explain, but I would say my attention is unfocused and broad. I don't know if this is ultimately safe, but I've never had an issue with it.
OTOH, I also evaluate and will not talk if I don't feel comfortable (poor road conditions, etc).
"The available research indicates that cell phone use while driving, whether it is a hands-free or hand-held device, degrades a driver’s performance. The driver is more likely to miss key visual and audio cues needed to avoid a crash. Hand-held devices may be slightly worse, but hands-free devices are not risk-free."
Though it doesn't link to any studies and I'm too lazy to go searching, so if you want a primary source you'll have to find it yourself...
https://one.nhtsa.gov/Driving-Safety/Distracted/Policy-State...
Just like talking to other people in the car or doing anything else other than driving. I know that I will take a driver getting their messages read out to them over a driver who takes their eyes off the road and glances at the phone. Good is the enemy of the perfect, and I would rather take an attainable good over an unattainable perfect.
No that's not true, talking to other people int he car is not associated with reduced safety.
Probably because the other people in the car are also partially watching the road.
Mazda will walk this decision back as soon as they realize how much money it will cost them... which is a lot.
People caught while texting during driving:
First time offense: Massive fine and three month licence revocation
Second offense: Permanent license revocation. Because you just have proven beyond a doubt that you're either too dumb or too reckless to be allowed to operate deadly machinery.
Phoning while driving is dangerous. Texting while driving is just outrageously stupid and grossly negligent
Knowing where you’re going before you take off is generally a good idea. A paper map may not be the solution—pulling up an online map and figuring out your route before getting in your vehicle is one way and what I tend to do.
I routinely see locals plug local destinations into their navigator-of-choice, though, so expecting people to know the lay of the land these days may be a bridge too far. God forbid there is construction or an accident and you have to improvise!
Get a dock for your phone and use bluetooth for the audio. (Or line-in, except headphone jacks keep disappearing...)
> so you can send and receive text messages without taking your eyes off the road.
Holy fuck no. Don't encourage this. Taking your eyes off the road is only one symptom of the problem. The problem is splitting your attention.
There's a TV show where they demonstrate this most years, Canada's Worst Driver. The challenge is to drive in a circle on a track. Talking on the phone - not ever looking away from the road - is enough to start veering off the track.
It’s amazing.
It's a thing when when all your music is already on your phone.
What I want? An empty shelf just to the right of the steering wheel where I can charge my phone and connect it to car audio. I don't want to hand-off my navigation or music selection to the vehicle, just allow me to put my phone in a prominent visible location.
If CarPlay makes it more tempting or productive for me to do non-driving things while I am driving, then it is not a good driving UX.
I'm guilty of being that sort of person occasionally. I've found that having CarPlay in my new car reduces the temptation to do "non-driving things," because the things that I do that are related to driving -- navigation apps, streaming music, and for me, playing podcasts -- become easier to do with CarPlay's UX than with just using the phone in a holder like I did in my last car. The screen in my car is much bigger, the touch targets are bigger, the UI is simplified, the design encourages me to use voice input. (In your example of changing to a different playlist, I can just press the Siri button -- which perhaps amusingly in this discussion, is a physical button on my Insight's steering wheel! -- and say "Play [name of playlist].")
I'm pretty sure that puts you somewhere near the top 0.0000001% of cautious drivers.
Is it possible your friends are dumb? Because my 79 year old mother doesn't have an issue with CarPlay. The only potentially confusing thing is that it becomes your phone screen, and things you do on the phone influence what's on the CP screen.
The possible confusing-one-time scenario would be, say, driver using AppleMaps to navigate somewhere, and passenger using phone to look up the capital of Nebraska or whatever. When passenger pushes the home button to go to the browser, CarPlay will exit navigation and show ITS home screen, too.
Nav is still happening; you just have to switch back to it, just as you would on the phone.
And, again, this should really only be surprising once.
>Nobody riding in my (ancient) car has ever had trouble finding the big red/blue knob to change the temperature, or understanding "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want". This is a solved problem.
CarPlay makes no effort to provide anything other than phone integration, so your climate control knob is safe.
Throwing shade on CarPlay by saying the problem was solved with an aux cable is pretty laughable, honestly. Sure, you could fiddle with your phone and play music, but there's no access to nav, no access to voice controls, and you have to grabble with your phone to change anything. CarPlay provides a large screen in a static location that simplifies the music approach, plus gives you access to other functions.
This is materially better than an aux cable.
(Please do not start a iOS vs Android battle over this comment -- this is simply my experience -- I use both on a daily basis -- your mileage may vary)
Don't knock it until you've tried it. First off, you are completely wrong about it being an all-touchscreen situation. There are plenty of physical controls. Many people like you form conclusions based on not knowing anything about the car other than what you are told by other people. Think for yourself. Take one for a test drive.
In this case, though, this has been basically a solved problem for the past 50 years, if not longer. Yeah, there might be an argument whether a radial switch or a touchpad with gesture recognition is better, and you can play with positioning, but you don't just go to an objectively inferior touchscreen system and then try to make it slightly better.
The other car manufacturers UIs are atrocious and their historical unwillingness to use car play has set them back.
The tactile thing is one of those arguments that sounds good, but is just wrong. It’s like people arguing for the return of the blackberry form factor in smartphones.
Is there something wrong with that? The BlackBerry form factor is the best one, in my opinion. This reply was written from one.
One of Steve Jobs's famous argument on this is that you can make the UI better over time on touchscreen interfaces compared to QWERTY based ones.
I know you're trying to be snarky, but there is no product that "fits all use cases" because this implies that it's perfect.
Therefore, your pseudo code statement is inherently flawed. A perfect product or service simply does NOT exist. If it does, feel free to prove me wrong otherwise.
I wasn't alluding to anything. I said so explicitly that it was my personal opinion.
> If the Blackberry form factor is truly the best, people would still be buying them today.
People are buying them. They're not as popular as Apple's iPhone, but that says more about Apple's marketing than anything else.
> you can make the UI better over time on touchscreen interfaces compared to QWERTY based ones.
My phone has a touch screen (a large one), and if I really want to, I can bring up a virtual keyboard, so your point doesn't make sense.
And a hardware keyboard doesn't mean you can't make the user interface better. Android doesn't make very good use of the physical keys, but my old BB10 OS BlackBerry did, because it was designed with it in mind, and it was continually being improved.
How can you do this when the device has already been shipped with the keyboard? Unless you're suggesting that Blackberry offers an unrealistic replacement program to change the keys and their function. Also tactile keyboard takes away a significant screen real estate. The market has also proven that people want bigger screens. There is no disputing that.
Furthermore, the keyboard does not significantly impact the size of the screen (it's only about an inch tall)[1], and it means the software keyboard doesn't pop-up and change the size of the screen, which is always disruptive. Also, the keyboard is touch sensitive, so the behaviour of the gestures can be changed in software (like swipe left to delete a word).
[1] The screen is too large for my preferences anyway.
I'd actually be curious how many people are buying them - it wasn't enough to save RIM. I think not as popular as the iPhone is a pretty big understatement and thinking that's mostly about Apple's marketing comes across as pretty clueless to me.
Some people still prefer horses to cars, but it'd be a generally bad idea for someone getting into the transportation business to focus on horse drawn carriages.
Popular doesn't necessarily mean better, but when you're an extreme outlier compared to what's dominant in the market and what's dominant in the market directly out-competed your preference when it had dominant market advantage, there's probably a reason.
That's a false analogy. A horse-drawn carriage is a fundamentally different mode of transportation than a car, but a BlackBerry is identical to any other smartphone except for the small keyboard on the front.
The reason BlackBerries are not popular is because early touch screen smartphones were simply so much better than the BlackBerries of the day, and that set the precedent in consumers' minds that smartphones are slabs and smartphones with keyboards are bad (as evidenced by the people in this thread). But modern BlackBerries are just slabs with keyboards. If BlackBerry didn't aim their company at the ground at full throttle, the present phone landscape might look a lot different.
Also, most people simply don't need a smartphone with a keyboard, because all they use it for is SnapChat and FaceBook. It's like saying mechanical keyboards are inferior to rubber membrane keyboards because only a relatively tiny portion of the population uses them.
And yes, people are buying them. Not many, but it's apparently enough to be profitable, because TCL keeps releasing new models. Not on the levels of Samsung's S or Apple's iPhone devices obviously, but that's not what matters. (Close to a million KeyOne models were sold in 2017, but I don't know what the current numbers are like.)
This is a very common misconception. You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive.
In fact, you can this for most of the common controls. The settings on the touch screen are mostly for things that you only really bother with once like saving your seat-position and personal settings to your driver profile.
I'm doing web searches for this right now and not finding anything, either for Model 3 or Model S, or just Tesla in general.
Where do they hide this information?
I've owned a Tesla for nearly 3 years, and I have no idea how to do that via the steering wheel controls. I'll dork around with the interface when I get back in my car after work today to try to figure that out. But evidently at least for me, feature discovery is half the challenge, no matter how easy it is once you've discovered it.
That video tutorial is now outdated since there has been many UI improvements, but the steps should still be the same.
Terrible idea? It's the best thing since sliced iPhone. Keep in mind that the "car" is usually driving itself; that's a much higher level of solving the "silly human takes eyes and hands off road" problem, which makes what Mazda is doing seem, frankly, short-sighted (disclosure: although a Honda/BMW/Tesla fan, I've always secretly cheered for Mazda because I like their driving "DNA," and if I ever buy another non-EV again it might just be an MX-5 NA or NB for autox/track use). Now, of course, they're _currently_ not in the same league, but this stuff is getting cheaper (technology! heck yeah!) and these changes should be a look toward the future. All of that said, I don't feel like there's anything wrong with the move they're making, just, again, doesn't seem terribly forward-looking -- other than that, it's perfectly fine.
But I think the bigger problem is that even if touchscreen were a better way of integrating with a phone, it's still a completely wrong way of interacting with anything in a moving vehicle. At least with Audi's classic MMI I could control almost everything without looking at buttons or screen (well, can't quite input addresses that way, but you shouldn't do it while driving anyway). Even apart from all the privacy-sucking implications of at least Android Auto, running infotainment through the phone with touchscreen interface sounds like a terrible idea.
Either you should be driving or on your phone not both.
I started my career working on Ford Sync. I remember going to an exec fireside-chat type of thing where someone stood up and said "the worst mistake of my career was outsourcing vehicle interiors in the 70s/80s." This was to a group of engineers who were almost entirely outsourcing all of Ford Sync development to an offshore team. They didn't see the irony.
When I bought a car I went out of my way to find a way to avoid having Sync on it. I did succeed, but the best I could do was bug a separate cigarette outlet usb adapter so I could use it instead of the built-in USB port in the car. Why? Because plugging it into the car would force me to inherit all of the bugs in the assumptions built into Sync.
I left Ford with the impression that vehicle OEMs are the Nokias of the auto-world. I wouldn't bet on them to make a good consumer electornics end user experience.
It also doesn't "take over" your phone. You can use your phone normally while it's plugged into CarPlay; I think the only difference is that phone calls will be done through the car's audio system.
Here are the problems:
* When my phone is plugged into CarPlay, it completely takes over the entire head unit/nav system/screen of the car. I cannot easily swap in and out between CarPlay and the various control systems on my center screen -- Nav, car settings, etc. I'm STUCK IN CARPLAY. I cannot have the directions from the nav system show up in the MID display between the gauges, either, even though that's a separate display.
* It took over my phone. I was unable to do anything using my phone. Perhaps that has changed, but this is the way it was in 2016 which was 2nd gen of CarPlay, where they started adding more apps.
* Phone calls done through my car's audio system -- correct. However, this was also the case over bluetooth. That was the main problem with carplay. Bluetooth already solved most of the problems CarPlay purported to solve -- I had phone calls, streaming spotify, etc. The only thing I didn't have without CarPlay was a simplified Spotify (or whatever app) UI on my in-dash screen, hiding everything else I might want to do on said screen.
As a User Experience Professional, I was
never able to grasp the true user's need
for touch screens in cars.
Stage 2: Well, given that we've got this touchscreen, we might as well use it for.....
Now, if you care about a nice radio in your car, you need to upgrade your entire car for $5k.
I have an otherwise awesome Honda Pilot with a built in, unsupported android tablet that doesn't support carplay or android auto, and is hard to replace without heavy hackery because core controls of the car are built into the tablet.
Maybe if the touch screen were Tesla-sized it would have been easier to use, but on a regular sized screen, even switching modes takes much more attention with a touch screen, because you need to look at it, move your hand to it, make sure you're hitting the correct location, wait until it registers,m make sure you've actually hit the right spot. With a rotary it was "slide down, no need to look because it clicks, click or two clockwise (still no need to look), push down, q
Maybe if the touch screen were Tesla-sized it would have been easier to use, but on a regular sized screen, even switching modes takes much more attention with a touch screen, because you need to look at it, move your hand to it, make sure you're hitting the correct location, wait until it registers,m make sure you've actually hit the right spot. With a rotary it was "slide down, no need to look because it clicks, click or two clockwise (still no need to look), push down, quick glance that you're on the right screen, click clock- or counterclock-wise to select what you need. Much safer and easier, and you're not going to hit a wrong thing because you drove over a bump.
For entering addresses a large touch screen is nicer, but then a keyboard is even better, but since you're only supposed to do that while parked, so hitting a wrong button shouldn't be a big problem.
There's a big difference between what is safe and convenient when you are sitting at your desk, lazily poking at the screen, and what is acceptable when you are barrelling down the highway, with the screen you need to stretch your arm to reach.
On my wife's Sonata, e.g., sure, you can switch the screen between map, nav. entry, radio, etc. with physical buttons. But after that it's all touch screen.Thank God they at least left alone knobs for the climate control...
Sat in the eTron lately while waiting for service. Two Nice, bright screens with haptic feedback. Very much fun, as long as I was playing with it on a showroom floor. But I shudder to think of actually trying to use on the road.
This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user.
That statement isn't true, Car Play support for me was a non-negotiable for the car I purchased two years ago. Another friend made Android Auto support a big factor in his decision and said he wouldn't buy another vehicle that didn't support it. From other conversations we don't seem to be outliers, that feature support is incredibly user(buyer) centric.
It's a big point in my car buying decision just for the navigation experience alone.
Tactile feedback is also a huge security benefit. This is what really doesn't make sense to me about the desire for touchscreens in cars - they're inherently dangerous.
Genuinely curious: what does the interface being "branded" have to to with the user? To me, focusing on whether their interface is branded would be more business-driven rather than user-centric.
...or figured out that you aren't as good at software as you are at building cars.
Honestly, CarPlay/Auto have been a godsend for me. The navigation software works better than anything I get from car manufacturers and just keeping me from mucking with my phone is fantastic. That said... I'm not sure the touchscreen part of that is the real winner there for me.
You are viewing the 'need' from the end user perspective. That is likely not the driving force that is causing touch screen proliferation.
The likely driving force that is causing it is the manufacturers BOM costs.
A single, rectangular, touch screen, that can swallow up a bunch of different knobs and buttons and basic displays, is likely cheaper from an overall BOM perspective than the set of knobs and buttons and basic displays (and supporting material (mechanical and wiring) for those knobs/buttons/displays).
And, if two (or more) different car models use the same size rectangular screen, then one single "screen" can be used for plural models (with only software differences) vs. the need for unique moldings/buttons/etc. when providing the physical knobs and buttons on different models.
The touch screen also enables different "accessory classes" even within the same model by a software change vs. a different piece of hardware. Think basic hot/cold/manual blower speed climate control vs. higher end climate control where you set a specific temp and the system picks heat/cool/blower speed. The same single touch screen can provide both the 'basic' and the 'luxury' interface via a software change vs. two different physical control units inserted into the dash.
Of course you need to get the touch screen reliable. A touch screen is more complex than a button, but if we call it the cost of 10 buttons, a touch screen replaces more than 10 buttons...
For common functions separate buttons are better for UX. However the touch screen is cheaper.
I don't think I've ever seen a touch screen with only two wires. For one thing, even power requires two wires, not one. Data for a touch screen typically requires more than one wire as well, especially considering there are two completely distinct types of data a touchscreen must transmit, those being display output and touch input.
Most touch screens I'm aware of have wire connections more like this:
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-2-4-color-tft-touchscree...
> Usually they're replacing a lot more than 2 buttons/knobs.
Not usually. Other than the Tesla, most cars retain almost all of their knobs/buttons in addition to the touch screen. In fact, the linked article in the OP says they're basically replacing the touch screen input with a single volume knob that lets you additional tilt and push it. Other cars, like BMW with the iDrive, usually have a single knob that lets you rotate and scroll through menus and push to select. Granted, it's not a simple knob, since it requires multiple degrees of input, but even a plastic knob that allows rotating, tilting, and pushing is probably cheaper than a touch screen when shared across models and mass produced.
I still think the bigger savings is probably the software updates required to constantly support and make your vehicle's physical input compatible with every new update of Android Auto and Apple Car Play, which the auto-makers have no control over and can only ever play catch-up. At least with a touch screen, they know that's where the Android and Apple engineers spend their own time making compatible.
The other place it probably saves is designing and laying out the interior, since it's easier to design an interior with fewer purpose-focused inputs. I'm not sure though if the touch screen would actually be easier though, since it can't be broken up across different small areas, and the entire thing has to be within both reach and active field of view. Especially the screens on top of the dash, since those often are designed to retract, which means the space they retract into needs to be designed around the HVAC and electrical systems between the firewall and dash.
Either way, both of these savings though would be on the design and engineering side, not the bill of materials.
That link is to a toy touchscreen. Are we counting every strand of metal as its own wire now? I think the power and the data cables are each bundles of lots of such strands, and no car manufacturers worry about the individual strands because each cable plugs into the circuit board as a cohesive unit, like: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Customized-odm-15-6-i...
(First Google result for "touchscreen alibaba", it's not like this is an obscure, rarely used configuration.)
Either way, both of these savings though would be on the design and engineering side, not the bill of materials.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Those sound like good points to me, but I don't know anything about this stuff.
Something that hasn't even been mentioned is all the meetings, documentation, coordination between people that work on the components that have to interface with each other. That labor is significantly reduced when you offload most of that to the touch screen because some of that interface can now be done by the same person without any meetings. That's not just cost savings, it's also time savings, which is part of why Tesla was able to bring the model 3 to market so fast (fast at least in the car world).
That said, I much prefer tactile controls. I recently moved from a BMW to a Volvo had the BMW had physical controls for most common functions while the Volvo only has a handful of buttons and one knob for volume. It's a pretty good balance, but I do miss a few buttons and more could be done on the touchscreen to ease that longing (such as customizable shortcuts).
Cadillac is starting to go back to more tactile controls because they've learned how terrible it is without any (my wife has a CTS so I completely understand why they're doing it -- it is awful). I hope Audi changes course too.
The chasis is your second cable.
I support Mazda's efforts here, but there are compelling commercial and engineering reasons to go in the other direction.
It blows my mind away how you can even begin to compare the predicted reliability of a complex touchscreen interface stuffed with active electronics to dumb buttons and wires with a straight face, let alone what fielded production units only a few years in have clearly demonstrated.
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
Touch screens are staggeringly cheap now, as anyone with a Raspberry Pi and too much free time can attest, and fits virtually any car, as opposed to switch gear design which often requires the rest of the dash to fit with the design of the button or knob too. A screen mounting location is usually just a rectangular hole in a dash.
If you consider the entire cost, yes. Every BOM item has a huge cost associated with it, and it's price only a small fraction.
Consider that for every item you need to:
* secure supply for the next 10 years or so
* organize purchasing and put it into the supply chain
* design assembly instructions, teach workers how to assemble it
* design and implement testing procedures
* design and implement diagnostics to figure out which specific component has failed
* maintain it and keep it available for your service network for the next 10-15 years
* deal with unexpected failure rates and be ready to re-design in case of problems
* also, every knob is actually not one component, because it needs to be connected to something, which implies wires and connectors (the most problematic components in electronics) and multiples all of the above several times.
Look at it this way and suddenly you really want to minimize the number of individual components and replace them all with a single touchscreen. Especially given that you can then deliver crappy software and the market will bear it, because we have been trained to expect and accept crappy software.
But I do agree that the marketing appeal is there, too, although I think some people are waking up.
I'd put it differently; I'd say we've been trained to expect anything with (user-visible) software to be crappy, and to accept it because we have no alternative.
I enjoy driving a manual ("stick") and distrust auto-braking/lane assist/etc. My car has airbags, ABS and traction control so I'm happy with the safety features.
No way will I buy a car where essential functions are touchscreen operated, or with any phone-home "features".
Your list includes "Air Bags, ABS and Traction Control" - this list was fine in the early 90s, but you've missed one of the most life saving innovations in recent modern car history - Electronic/Dynamic Stability Control.
Multiple studies have shown ESC has potential to reduce fatal accidents by a third - this is largely why it was made mandatory on all cars sold in the EU and US since 2011/12. If you own a powerful vehicle, especially a rear wheel drive one, the kind of driver input mess (accidental or intentional) ESC systems can clean up that otherwise has you spinning off the road is pretty amazing.
It's impossible (without great expense) to add a new physical button to a car as an upgrade. Very easy to push a software update that updates a touch display.
Yeah, the molding for any typical single component is tens of thousands of dollars per iteration. A car has a lot of those components, so the fewer the better.
Maybe throw in some cheeky DLC to unlock certain features too ;)
Car companies don't tend to custom-design knobs/buttons/etc. for each model. They tend to reuse the same ones across many models to save on development and manufacturing costs. They also already modularize these knobs and buttons across different "accessory classes". You can probably see this in your own car even, if you see anywhere on your car's center console or dashboard which has plastic caps where it seems like more buttons or knobs belong. Those are likely buttons/knobs for additional functions in optional feature packages.
Also, even for the same screen size across models, you'd still likely need custom bezels since most models are differently sized and thus have different dashboard shapes/sizes within which the screen is mounted.
Especially with how high-resolution touchscreens in cars are becoming in new models, I doubt they're cheaper than a handful of plastic knobs and buttons.
My guess is that it's exactly what they said. It's probably harder from a software perspective to adapt touch-screen-based interfaces like Android Auto and Apple Car Play to physical controls, and those difficulties probably come up over and over as the versions of these interfaces on the phones are constantly being updated, and the car must continue supporting more and more versions at one time.
Every modern car is going to have an infotainment system with a screen. A better question would be whether it is cheaper to have a touch version of that screen or to have buttons for the interface. I suspect that touch would be cheaper than buttons.
Back when I always used to drive the same car I got used to its dimensions of course, but that just doesn't happen when you merely occasionally drive very different cars.
The last car I rented had a 360 degree camera which showed a top down picture of the car and surroundings!
Also, if every other car parked forward/reverse then the more cramped spaces wouldn't be as difficult. Note, I live in AZ, USA where more than half the cars are full sized or larger vehicles. So parking lots designed for cities with smaller vehicles are particularly difficult.
* If the design of your car makes you a less safe driver, you are more likely to crash into me.
* The US as a society has committed (surprisingly recently) to providing emergency care to anyone who shows up at a hospital before asking whether they can pay. Car accidents are a sadly common reason for people requiring emergency care. That means that reducing car accidents is a public benefit.
* Modern societies have made the choice in general to require some baseline level of safety from all sorts of products in order to make commerce more efficient. If consumers feel confident that they can (e.g.) buy a random toy off the shelf for their kid without needing to do a bunch of research on whether it contains lead paint or dangerous parts, that reduces friction and increases sales. The same reasoning can apply to car safety features: it's easier to get people to just buy a car if they have a baseline level of confidence that any car they buy is safe to drive.
That's just a few reasons that first came to mind. I've already thought of one or two more that would take a little longer and a little more care to put into words, but I encourage you to think about these questions yourself when they come to mind, too.
Consumer protection on the other hand, is quite a bit longer in the tooth. Though did really start after the 50's. I know the original erector sets were particularly bad, as were earlier die cast models, etc.
B. That's.. not communism.
C. Especially in this case, the safety issue affects everyone else on the road, too. If someone crashes into you while playing with their Apple Play, congrats on enjoying the unregulated free market.
If your kid takes a ride in a friend's dirt cheap car they bought because they're 17 and they get in a wreck, congrats.
If manufacturers can make and sell unsafe cars, they will, and it will drive up the cost of safe cars.
When products as critical as cars unsafe, it costs everyone, even those who don't buy them.
Whilst I think this is part of it's about more than just reducing the BOM. There's a trend to move all interfaces from knobs and switches to touch screens even when money isn't the problem. For example the SpaceX Dragon capsule also takes this approach which you can see from the images below:
https://www.spacex.com/crew-dragon
A heavily vibrating vehicle which needs to be operated quickly and with 100% reliability by a human operator really should not be operated via a proliferation of touch screens and touch buttons as the images above show.
I think current fashions are very much to blame in a lot of cases. A sleek touchscreen operated car in the showroom is a sexier buy than your more traditional button festooned dashboard. Buyer's only get a chance to regret it after they've spent a lot of time with the vehicle.
In fairness to SpaceX, Dragon largely isn't designed to be operated by a human. There's a reason that page calls out stuff like "how warm should the cabin be" as the sort of decisions being made with these touchscreens.
> Crew Dragon will be a fully autonomous spacecraft that can also be monitored & controlled by on board astronauts and SpaceX mission control in Hawthorne, CA.
NASA is a very conservative organization and if there is a lesson to be learned from past near disasters, is how limited is the foresight of mission planners and how infinitely adaptable are the human astronauts.
A lot of the controls in an Apollo were to be used in normal manual operations that are automated (or have no counterpart) in Dragons.
BTW, not surre if they implemented it in the end, but they planned to handle screen blurring due to vibrations by shifting the screen content based on accelerometer data in real time. A rather clever idea IMHO. :)
IIRC, Orion does that by timing the screen backlight.
If I had a choice between Orion, Starliner or Dragon, I'd go with the Dragon. The spacesuits are much nicer and if I have to die, I'd rather go with style.
Computerized fly by wire systems still depend on a pilot in the loop, especially in the case of a mechanical failure.
https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/f-35-faces-mos...
Several years ago, probably. Now, when their previous car already has a similar touchscreen?
Exactly. Touch screens are pure tech fad in about 50% of use cases at least, with the decision to use them not based on any kind of practical considerations.
However, I'm a little skeptical that the average buyer is going to regret using one. A lot of people seem to get hung up on newer tech == better tech, so they never really seem to look at the newer technology with a critical eye. I often prefer older tech in some cases (e.g. buttons and knows), but my fiancee often doesn't get it and advises me to stop fighting it and go with the trend.
But we also know that replacing the steering wheel with a small knob is a bad idea.
This is because this is a mature technology has that has as many bad implications as good ones.
I guess I’m a way tough screens need to be everywhere since that is how the technology matured and we know where they should not be used.
Cars already know whether a passenger is present of course.
Sturdy rotary controls which really are knobs are much better for a car. If you're on a bumpy road, the axis of the control will stabilize your hand. The controlling motion (twisting) can be more easily controlled, even if the bumps are trying to move your hand up and down. (I never see cars on the highway rapidly rotate about their roll axis more than 10 degrees. This only happens in Fast and Furious movies.) Furthermore, the feedback necessary to get from the control is all tactile. Contrast this with a slider control. An up/down slider is bad, because the control movement is in line with the direction of the bumps. Even a left/right slider has some problems with this, if your arm isn't perpendicular with the control.
Contrast all of the above with controls on a touchscreen. Almost all of the feedback is visual. Simply registering your hand on the control requires visual feedback. There is almost no physical stabilization of your hand in bumpy conditions. Instead, you have to compensate with a hand/eye feedback loop, which requires even more visual attention.
There is no reason that I NEED to launch Spotify from an actual switch controller...
https://www.alliedelec.com/product/electroswitch-inc-/6600/7...
But it feels so much better to control inputs with hardware. And rotary dials for volume, and many tasks in photoshop are infinitely superior.
Their again, many examples of not the best design happening as the consensus of public know how to use it. QWERTY keyboard layouts being classic example.
Then consoles and the mouse+keyboard combo over a game-controller pad. For FPS, mouse wins for ease of control still for me.
But the big takeaway for me about physical buttons over virtual touch-screen ones is the ability to leverage muscle memory. With physical buttons, you know were they are, how they feel and can do that without looking. Bit like sending a text from a nokia phone whilst it's in your coat pocket. Try doing that with a touch-screen based phone. Whilst not an everyday use, it does highlight the advantages of buttons in some uses.
Now, there is work ongoing in haptic feedback and some impressive work in the field of using ultrasound to create virtual surfaces you can feel. Which for many I'm sure will be great, but then the whole KISS design philosophy has somewhat taken a backseat in the name of features. But then, features are what sells many tech items today as they are still evolving. But there will always be people who prefer actual buttons. More so if you have ever been in a lift with a touch screen instead of buttons, which is something not to be sneezed at, literally unless you want to visit extra floors.
It's 100% fad driven. Expect block chain in a car at some point because the future.
Initially this was done to save cost, but lately it's removed a severe and justified roadblock to the addition of useless features, IMO.
A year or two ago I considered buying another car after I had a fedex semi hit me (turning left from a stop, not dangerous). I drive a 2004 corolla and love toyota, but the guy looked at me like I had grown frog legs when I asked if they had any models without the touchscreen.
It was actually a major decision in me keeping my vehicle. I do NOT like the touchscreen, to me it's a complete no-brainer that it's more dangerous. I sure as shit don't want to be clicking through crap while driving.
When I was in HS I had a friend whose family had a couple of toyota vehicles. One of them was a small orange truck from the 70's I think. That thing looked like absolute crap, but ran beautifully. The only thing that finally killed that vehicle was their son going around a curve too quickly in the rain and rolling it. It's why I decided to buy toyota and I'm 100% happy with it.
But this touchscreen issue is a big enough issue in my mind that I may start researching Mazda. I seriously do not want a damned touchscreen in my car.
And maybe part of it is me being set in my old man ways, but I don't want a touch screen for any of that. Probably the only 2 things I can see being useful on that screen are the reverse camera and GPS that talks to you and you can glance at it occasionally.
Anything else should have real controls.
Apparently this was actually changed in an early software update to the TM3, and cruise initially was engaged via the screen though!
https://interestingengineering.com/tesla-moves-autopilot-con...
You can use the screen as described, but it is much quicker to roll the right steering wheel button up/down to adjust TACC speed. You can also push it left/right to adjust follow distance.
I rarely touch the screen while driving my Model 3 (or while my Model 3 is driving me).
The A/C on both vehicles is 100% physical controls, no touch screen required, in fact I've yet to see an A/C option on any of the touch screen menus.
Yes, the radio is mostly configured via the touch screen, but skipping stations / tracks and volume are controllable via controls on the steering wheel and a physical volume knob on the dash. We don't have carplay yet, but I think it is in the US, this might make my moot, but my main complaint is that it can be quite delayed in starting to play my itunes. I suspect this is because my phone is the secondary audio device (I usually let my wife pick/control the music), but thats a minor annoyance at most.
Edit: 6.3l/100km 37.3mpg on Hilly -> Urban commute in an SUV :)
I have a 2016 Toyota Corolla, and the entertainment system is a touchscreen, but I haven't touched it in years. There are several knobs and buttons located around the screen and on the steering wheel that provide full control over the functions, without needing to physically touch the screen.
Maybe they have changes this in the last 3 years, but at least the 2016 models do have physical controls that are duplicated both on the entertainment panel and the steering wheel.
While there is a touchscreen, you don't need to touch it.
Recently my Logitech Harmony ONE died, and I replaced it with their current high-end device. I HATE it. I want to be looking at the TV when using it, not shifting attention to the remote's touch screen. Worse, the remote wants to support lots of controls, which it implements by allowing a swipe between pages. But it's way too easy to accidentally change pages, and the pages are all different kinds of things, so it's not clear how to swipe back to the one you want.
So I took the $100+ device and threw it in the closet. I bought their 665 model, which is a big "peanut" form factor. It has all physical buttons, except four are located on the edge of an LCD screen. But that's not a touch screen, it's just for labeling purposes. All the buttons on the device are physical. This $50 device is so much easier to use than it's big brother.
When that happens a touchscreen and the ability to play games/etc makes a lot of sense. I think what Tesla and others are doing is designing and preparing for the future. Although not ideal right now, they'll be far ahead of Mazda when we transition to self-driving cars.
Meantime the passenger can enjoy the touchscreen.
And damn, I got pulled over once for suspicion of drunk driving, in my wife's car. In the process of finding some knob, I had drifted out of the lane.
Anyway, heads-up is a great alternative. I look forward to lots of cool AR.
What you are really advocating is tactile feedback for digital displays--with some method of shaped feedback on by the screen itself. As a touch screen's in cars don't offer haptic feedback, that is an issue. That said some aspects like moving up and down stations or songs in a playlist can be controlled by steering wheel paddles or buttons on the wheel.
It's why I love Carplay. It expands the function of the car in a needed way. Maybe analog controls are better, but interface matters less to me than function.
Touch screens are cheap, mechanical switches are expensive. Mechanicals are expensive from an acquisition cost, tooling/manufacturing cost, maintenance cost, and replacement cost. So automakers were happy to move everything into the touch screen and reduce these costs and boost their margin.
I hope Mazda will be able to hold this line with their accountants.
There will always be the cost of additional wiring harness and copper wire at some cost per foot. Some additional testing time when the consoles are assembled to verify the switches are all working Etc. Time has a cost associated with it during assembly as well.
I spend a lot more time getting things set "just right" on my phone than I ever will on my car. Being able to hop in and have Waze, Google Maps, Pandora "just work" and be easily accessible rather than some built in system within the car that's going to just "check a box"...it's night and day. Car Play was so far above anything I've seen in a vehicle before that I actually miss it when it's not there.
I can understand the preference for analog controls though. It will be interesting to see how it pans out.
I just bought my first vehicle with it yesterday, so maybe I'll get better at it. Touchscreens are not great in cars but if you can perform the action quickly, it beats fiddling with a knob for 15 seconds.
IOW a well-designed touchscreen UI can be better than a poorly designed non-touchscreen UI. And, unfortunately, most car infotainment systems are poorly-designed.
I absolutely hate user interface of my Audio (with rotary knob and without touch screen), so I use CarPlay pretty much exclusively.
I would love to be able to use a touch screen on that for some of the interactions.
> It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
You can't expect that all car markers will develop a good branded interface, just like most Android phone makers have a UI that's worse than the standard Android one.
With CarPlay, I get to use a UI from a company that's an expert a making good apps.
So they outsource to Apple and Google that made a, frankly, even with touchscreens, better system then what car manifacturers would have ever produced.
Now the problem is that Apple and Google had a hammer and treated the problem like it was a nail when it was not...
Edit: Also, in all fairness, where the screen is relative to the dash matters, and the size of it as well. From the photos on the post, those Mazda touch screens looked pretty small and awkwardly positioned for touch controls.
The baffling thing about that is that Audi's MMI system was actually pretty darned good. And a few of the cars support controlling Apple Carplay with the rotary dial.
Audi and BMW used to sell their dial interfaces as a unique advantage over touchscreen only infotainment systems. It blows my mind that they're (Audi at least) going in the opposite direction now.
This is really wrong. People were begging Mazda to add Android Auto and Apple CarPlay for years and they have only just recently added them. Adding these features has everything to do with what people want. Android Auto is pretty amazing, and is steadily getting better as well.
I assumed this was widely known (because of COURSE we do), but the digital touch screens were CHEAPER than dedicated physical controls for all desired functions. To design as well as to mass produce.
If the Mazda navigation/interaction/entertainment experience is better, I'm definitely in favor. I miss the in-between period, where I could just insert a USB drive with sorted directories of mp3s and use that easily.
Not insane but highly cynical. They are increasing risk to my - their user's - life in order to save some bucks on R&D and integration investment. Does it make you wonder where else did the make the same tradeoff? It should.
> I hope other brands start following Mazda again for this choice.
Same here. When I buy my next car, I would ensure it doesn't have controls that require me to be distracted from driving to operate even the most basic functions.
It's so good I wanted to write an actual article just about it. Touchscreen dashboards just make zero sense when you thoughtfully experienced that.
(The same-year US market one (which is a completely different car) for that same generation is similar but really not as good. Sadly They later moved to a more traditional design on the new ones)
But it's unusual and scares people, like OMG there are so many buttons, this looks like an airplane cockpit.
https://s3.caradvice.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Honda...
(if you get the GPS option the screen takes place of the clock/head unit display)
† not a gamified tally like they did with the Insight and CR-Z, but a real-time thing.
†† not a ridiculously small heads-up air fighter thing like Peugeot does that gets unreadable depending on light conditions
I'd love to read that article you proposed. As much as I'd love a Tesla, my last #2 car (now sold) was a '14 Mazda 3 Astina and the rotary knob just worked so well - and so did the buttons, not to mention that simple heads up display, that I felt this is better than what the expensive cars are getting.
I have an eye for the new Civic Type R; it looks like the engineers had a field day designing that. For now, just riding a bike as health for this ageing office chair worker had to take priority.
Lots of questionable decisions like the keyless lock system not locking if the tailgate was closing as you walk away, there being no way to turn the car off but leave the radio or AC on, and the engine cutting out as you try to drive off if you started it via remote start.
Otherwise, those sound like fair complaints. I'd add that Honda tried to go to a touch-based volume control in 2015/2016 and it was universally panned for its poor responsiveness and requirement that users take their eyes off the road to adjust radio volume. Can't win'em all I guess.
Designed for Use by Lukas Mathis
Design for Hackers by David Kadavy
The first car I bought with my own money was a Clio and the ability to control the integrated radio system without looking at it or having to take away the hands from the wheel made that car my favourite place to listen to music.
As a matter of fact I miss it so much that nowadays I almost don't listen to music while driving anymore.
EDIT
for reference the whole music controlling part was like [1], the source button switched from FM radio/AM radio/CD player and it had a wheel on the back that skipped CD tracks or radio stations, according to the current source.
If I remember correctly the lower button ejected a CD in CD mode or changed from saved station to manual tuning in radio mode.
If you pulled both the volume buttons at the same time, it muted the radio and paused the CD player.
[1] https://www.proxyparts.com/car-parts-stock/information/part-...
I still think the bash car dashboard was that of Honda Beat or Suzuki Cara — no dashboard, with just a motorcycle style gauge, and non-driving related controls almost wholely on steering wheel levers.
My cousin had a Pontiac in the late 90s that would project the speed on the windshield.
【车萝卜2代 汽车抬头显示器hud 汽车通用 无线导航 车载机器人】https://m.tb.cn/h.eU77dAA?sm=d1a047 点击链接，再选择浏览器咑閞；或復·制这段描述￥QASsYfMqMWi￥后到淘寳.
Carrobot is an actual projector, thus there are no questions about focus adjustments.
Other are usually just segment led or el screens, some with collimator, some without
The Renault I have has a combination of buttons on steering wheel, that controller, physical buttons in the center panel, touchscreen and some touch elements outside of the screen.
If you want to call somebody, you have to use the touchscreen either on your phone or in the car and it's always a pain. Controlling other things in the car is fine - there are physical buttons.
True.
Another thing that might not be obvious is that they are fixed on the steering wheel, so they are always in the same position relative the your hands, just like the gear levers in a modern Formula 1 car.
The best car interface, imho, is something like a rotary device or arrows buttons on the steering wheel (or back thereof) which can be used to manipulate an overlay projected on (or just below) the windshield. My current VW gets close, but the screen is in the lower half of the dashboard (way too far from actual view of the road), and the system can only be partially controlled by on-wheel buttons (the main control is a touchscreen in the middle of the car).
Obviously, the voice control would need to havr some way to ignore the kids in the backseat, or can ask the driver / parent for permission for this to be a good idea.
On the other hand, I still don't know whete my A/C knob is without looking.
The gearstick is one control with a very limited set of never-changing options that you have to use all the time, basically the best you can get as muscle-memory goes. Despite all this, it's not used where hyper-attention on the road is really necessary, i.e. in racing. And where do we get gearshift controls in racing? On the wheel.
I actually found this made them easier to find, as they're always in the same place relative to the rest of you. Controls on the steering wheel by contrast (as found in, e.g., my current car) move as the wheel rotates, and for some reason I can never quite keep track of where they are.
(The Clio also had the horn button on the indicator stalk. The in-car UX was super on point. Good quality stereo, too.)
http://www.burdigala-encheres.com/upload/biens/7186/191833.j...
> The Clio also had the horn button on the indicator stalk. The in-car UX was super on point
Yes, that was the Renault trademark :)
> Good quality stereo, too.
Probably one of the best for the price tag.
Our own little Hyundai Elantra GT 2013. No touch screen. Connect Android phone via bluetooth. Run Android Auto app. Navigate, stream music, etc etc. We're both used to this, so it's very ingrained/easy to use the phone's touchscreen to navigate the UI.
Mercedes C300. Big screen, but not a touch screen. You had to twist a joystick then move it up/down/left/right depending on... something. That UI control mechanism did not work well with Android Auto, since there were different "sections" to each screen. You had to figure out via trial and error which joystick control method to use to switch sections. Plus sometimes moving the joystick would twist it, thus ruining whatever UI navigation you were trying to perform.
Hyundai Sonata 2019. Big touch screen. Worked perfectly with Android Auto. Not one single "mis-click" like with the Mercedes.
IMO, only pickup trucks really know how to get this stuff right now, and that's mostly because there's so much space that the buttons can be giant.
I dearly miss the console in my base model 2006 Yaris. It had 3 Fisher Price-sized knobs that I never had to look at when switching from feet/defog/face, changing temperature, and fan speed. It never stressed me, and each position on the knob had a satisfying clunk.
I "upgraded" to a 2017 Subaru and the air controls are laid out with completely flat, indistinct buttons. The only knob is for temperature. Any time I need to change air position or speed, I need to take my eyes off the road and find the button, and then tap it multiple times to get to the right position.
I also drove a friend's 201x Civic for a couple months, and the air controls were actually worse: tiny buttons, tiny display showing what settings are current.
Bring back Fisher Price knobs, please.
Are you hot? Go ahead and press the down arrow 20 times to go from 80 to 60. Maybe it's not so bad if you switch your car to Celsius.
Or, with 50-year-old tech, turn a knob a quarter turn or a slider by 4 inches.
Compare the HVAC control on the base model Mazda3: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/xqIAAOSwlv9aU8Hh/s-l1600.jpg
With the HVAC control on the higher trim lines: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Xdav_EsJ3bQ/maxresdefault.jpg
The older/cheaper interface is WAY easier to control. Changing vent operation or fan speed on the new interface always takes way more button pushes and time until it's in the state I want.
Lower end cars are often more reliable too owing in part to simpler designs. Some of the highest end luxury and status symbol cars have frequent issues and high repair costs.
This makes me crazy. I used to drive a '99 Mazda b2500 (basically a Ford Ranger). I could reach any of the controls without even leaning forward. In a newer f150 that I used to drive for work the reach for the volume knob seems to be about the same distance as the reach to the passenger window crank in my old truck.
> There's a reason that our fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body. This is how we experience the world close-up. This is how our tools talk to us. The sense of touch is essential to everything that humans have called "work" for millions of years.
> Now, take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit.
> What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing? I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.
> Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.
> Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future.
http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
(that second-to-last paragraph is surprisingly on the nose with the car metaphor)
Rant is the right way to describe this.
Do you remember the first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen? The joy of panning and zooming around, tapping to learn more about any particular point! I remember that first experience was a total rush and extremely stimulating.
Feeling like the digital map was connected to my fingertip as you pan with that point stuck under your finger — absolute magic.
There are some interfaces which are absolutely superior when provided as picture under multi-touch glass.
Denying a touchscreen entirely is to make huge compromises in the overall experience when configuring something as fully featured as a modern vehicle.
At CES a decade ago, I got to play with a touchscreen prototype that offered tactile feedback. Press a button and the screen would push back and/or buzz (it's been a while, hard to remember). What I do know is that it _felt_ like I was pushing on something, not just glass.
At the time, it required a big area around it. Think ATM sized. For an ATM, it'd be awesome. I'd hope Moore's law would get the tech down to phone size by now, but here we are with more apps and no tactile feedback.
What do you mean by "press"?
"Pressing" a button (ie. pressing down on it) requires a bit more force than just touching it, so this seems like bad UX to me.
Even if you only were to have the device buzz as you touch any interactive control, I feel like that would start to feel real gimmicky real fast. There's probably a reason that technology didn't make it past CES.
Haptic feedback in a touch interface is not always a feature. And the lack of haptic feedback does not, ipso facto, make an interface numb or non-immersive. Some older touch screens would vibrate in response to every touch as you typed — it made typing less accurate.
I take issue with the overly zealous defense of a haptic interface to the point where the overall experience is degraded in order to provide haptics.
Four arrow keys (or worse, a wheel-like joystick) are indeed haptic, but they are not a better way to pan a map, which is not generally done without looking anyway.
Similarly, my Xbox 360 controller and modern games produce astonishing graphics and realism that feel really immediate; my eyes tell me I'm in the plane, and when I'm coming in too low and too fast I want to will the plane upwards. But I can't feel it. Pulling the stick back on my ancient force-feedback joystick with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 (wow, the graphics on that feel dated now) gave a tangible control surface load. The buzz of 'haptic feedback' just isn't the same.
You don’t want the navigation interface in your car to be immersive, or particularly precise. You want it to be super responsive, and to spend as little mental and physical energy manipulating it as possible.
1) The target area is massive — nearly the entire screen. You just need to leave space to move your finger in the direction you want the screen to go.
2) Perfectly intuitive. Versus moving a cursor on the screen where you actually press the left arrow to move the cursor left until it goes off screen so that the screen will pan right
3) Instantaneous access to any point on the screen. Tap a POI anywhere and it’s info can be displayed. Go ahead and try to select POIs in an arbitrary map location with a scroll wheel. I’ll wait. It’s “haptic”, but are you doing that without looking? Something which took milliseconds now takes a full minute of frustration.
4) Instant access to menu items. Similar to #3 - a touch interface can present multiple choices and requires only a single user input to select. One touch and you’re off. A haptic interface requires scrolling through menus to highlight an item before you can select it, which most people will glance at while they do it, and requires more mental focus than a single tap. Or worse, an array of buttons next to the screen which you’re supposed to choose from to make a selection on the screen.
But it's scientifically proven that the response time from touch to brain is significantly faster than eye to brain. So, let's not discount that.
There are some interfaces which are absolutely superior when provided as picture under multi-touch glass.
Superior to what? I think you mean superior to mouse + keyboard, and superior to a physical map. The author agrees with you, as he clarified in a followup [1] to the rant:
> [Do I think the iPad is bad?] No! iPad good! For now!
Do you remember the first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen?
He goes on:
> In 1900, Eastman's new Kodak camera was good! The film was black-and-white, but everyone loved it anyway. It was genuinely revolutionary! But it was also obvious that something was missing, and research continued. Practical color film was released thirty years later, and gradually took over.
> [...]
> Today, iPad good. It's flat and glassy and everyone loves it anyway. It's genuinely revolutionary. But if all we have in twenty years is an iPad with a few haptic gimmicks, that'll be bad.
The first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen, it was genuinely revolutionary—hopefully, you'll be similarly impressed the first time you use a map with purpose-built physical controls (not mouse + keyboard), but that is also dynamic (like a computer/tablet/smartphone). Maybe it'll be something like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
[1]: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
Superior to everything else that ever came before and that currently exists.
It is the ultimate user interface to ever be developed? Surely I hope not.
But I love the iPad because it’s flat and glassy, not despite it.
Really? Your kitchen counter and car windshield are also both flat and glassy. Are you sure you don't love the iPad because it's a huge touchscreen controlled by software with virtually limitless capabilities, rather than because it's flat and glassy?
Superior to everything else that ever came before and that currently exists.
That's my point about you misunderstanding—the rant is explicitly about the future, as mentioned in the title and throughout the introduction.
Black-and-white film photography was superior to everything else that ever came before and that existed at the time. But it wasn't the grayscale that made it revolutionary. It's not the lack of tactile feedback that made the touchscreen revolutionary.
If the rant is supposed to be about the future, then IMO it spends too much time disparaging the present. I think it’s a stupid and pointless rant if the premise is “this isn’t the best it will get.” Duh? That’s like the ultimate straw-man.
But obviously the point of the rhetoric which I originally took issue with is stronger than simply “this is super awesome and amazing but we will eventually do better”.
Rhetoric like “permanent numbness” or claiming the experience has “no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing” is inaccurate aside from being hyperbolic.
In fact I’m comfortable stating that I’ve never felt more connected with or immersed in a map than on a sleek multi-touch display. Additional controls around the screen which I would have to move my hand to manipulate, or an attempt to shoehorn a haptic interface into that — honestly I believe it would only serve to mediate and therefore dampen the connection between user and map.
A globe is haptic. But a globe lacks the affordances of multi-touch zooming. A digital globe that allowed zooming and panning, maybe even with a dynamic physical structure to represent topography, that would be fucking cool, but hardly portable. And so single purpose as to be a novelty.
The beauty of picture behind glass is how adaptable it is to any arbitrary task and how easily it can be reshaped and reformed, and new interaction modalities invented on the glass surface which are joyful and useful and efficient.
Haptic interfaces lock you in, they dictate function based on their form, they provide fixed manipulation points which can not rearrange to best suit the task at hand. As such, haptic interfaces given our current constraints on material science are often inferior and frustrating. Particularly for tasks which require dynamically adaptive coarseness and dynamic range of inputs, such as navigation.
Haptics are particularly difficult to allow users to manipulate interfaces through varying levels of acceleration and jerk, whereas the glass surface excels at this. Faster swipes, slower swipes, flicks, jabs, back and forth movements, and that’s all just one finger.
A click button is a one dimensional interaction point. Rarely is there a “click” affordance which measures harder or softer, except on “glass” type touchpoints.
The scroll wheels in the TM3 steering wheel is a great example of haptics striving to achieve this. The scrollwheel is awesome for fine grain incrementing and decrementing. But it’s also awesome because it has a “flick” mode where if you flick it fast the behavior changes in an interesting way!
For the right hand wheel, single clicks up and down increase and decrease cruise speed in 1 mph or kph increments. But a fast flick up or down (which may actually rotate the wheel 3 or 4 or 5 click points — who knows?) will move the cruise speed up to the next closest 5mph/kph increment (not up by exactly 5mph unless you were already divisible by 5).
This is a very neat HCI trick to provide a more usable scroll wheel. First, the fact that the wheel has click-points at approximately every 15 degrees (and the exact number of clicks per rotation is crucial based on the particular task!) rather than a smooth flowing wheel, translates naturally to integer changes in state.
Second, that it does have some concept of coarse vs fine-grained adjustments through the altered behavior when you flick it (likely triggered by at least 3 rapid clicks). But this all had to be very carefully designed into the hardware and firmware to make it all work for this particular task.
Third, because the particular task at hand doesn’t have a large dynamic range in the scale of the adjustments that need to be made. Rarely am I cruising at 20mph and then quickly find I want to be cruising at 80mph, or else the wheel would be terribly frustrating!
This is why trying to use the wheel (or really any haptic control) to pan or zoom a map is an exercise in total frustration. I know because that’s how my wife’s Mercedes tries to do it. Because sometimes I want to zoom out from a scale of 1mi on screen to 100mi on screen for a trip overview, and sometimes I just want to zoom from 1mi to 1.3mi to see the next turn. There are no obvious integer set-points to allow a haptic interface to lock on to, and the GPS interfaces which impose them tend to suck. The fact that I can’t directly address any arbitrary XY coordinate on the screen instantly compounds the frustration.
Maybe one day our devices will use nanobots to assemble any arbitrary per-app configuration of controls and gizmos and cranks and levers. But what exactly is the rant pitching in the meantime?
That’s like the ultimate straw-man.
Here's a similar one by LG, with a similarly high production value: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIRjytgNuhM
Here are more that appear to be by random designers/artists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myB1L_NMLGQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SIhlWFAJWk
He's not disparaging the present, as he tried to make clear by having the word "future" in the title and then another 16 times in the post. He's disparaging a vision of the future that is disappointingly widespread.
Haptic interfaces ... provide fixed manipulation points
which can not rearrange to best suit the task at hand.
You know, like I mentioned in my very first reply to you?
> ... a map with purpose-built physical controls (not mouse + keyboard), but that is also dynamic (like a computer/tablet/smartphone). Maybe it'll be something like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
fixed manipulation points ... haptic interfaces [are often] inferior and frustrating ... There are no obvious integer set-points to allow a haptic interface to lock on to
This is exactly the kind of thing that the author of the rant called "haptic gimmicks", and is nothing like what the author favors over touchscreens. The author is talking about a dynamic physical interface, like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
For a map, not only is there an arbitrary XY coordinate that you want, but you can literally put your finger on it, so it lets you just place the selector there. Zooming should be continuous, so the dial has no click-points. "Flying" "down" or "up" (aka zooming in or out) feels like physical motion, with momentum, so the dial has a slight physical heft, and spins with some momentum.
But of course you wouldn't want to use this dial for everything, just like you've explained with such clarity as to why you wouldn't want to use a click-wheel for everything. That's why this interface is literally made of paper—building a different interface for a different application is as easy as literally cutting and pasting.
Touchscreens will never replace real keyboards for people who make their living typing but can easily replace a scroll wheel for mindless browsing.
I would say that in a car, being able to navigate an interface without ever taking eyes of the road is a very clear example of a context where tactile feedback adds a lot
For me, it has always been about tactile feedback: I habitually text and drive, so a physical keyboard that allows for high accuracy without looking at the screen is an absolute imperative...everything else is a secondary consideration.
First off with regards to the touch screen in the Tesla. In the vast majority of drives I never ever touch it. Not once. Why not? Well I have my temperature preference set, I usually play the music that is coming off my phone, and well, what else do I need to adjust in my car? I can do music volume, do next or previous song, and pause music, from the left steering wheel button. Wipers and headlamps are automatic. Navigation is voice controlled and works.
I posted before when people came down on touch screens but let us be honest. In most modern cars there is so much automatic that you really never use the majority of controls you are presented with. Go ahead, put a sticker on every button in your car, count them. Then for each you use take a sticker off. Have fun.
Fortunately the Tesla interface is simple to use and almost everything you need is only one level deep. Unlike my other previous cars where menu travel seemed to go on for weeks.
So yeah, badly designed or badly placed touch screens are not good in cars but so is this myriad of buttons in most cars. Each car you get into you have to do a quick take on where things might be. Plus there are so many buttons. Buttons for functions you truly may never use!
edit: grammar/typos
Edit. Your top paragraph about user settings, that applies to any car that maintains a user profile, that's not a benefit of touch screens.
I did not declare that settings were the property of touch screens, I simply stated that the vast majority of settings that exist are never modified. This goes for cars with buttons too.
The discussion is that touch screens are bad. My point is for those touch screens which are not placed correctly or have a bad UI, then yes they can be bad. There are some atrocious implementations out there however the Tesla is certainly not one of them.
The whole point of muscle memory is that it doesn't require you to focus on it. By the same logic, you would take your focus off driving whenever you have to breathe.
I just don't think there's the same level of muscle memory when it comes to a contextual touch screen. One method of turning on the wipers in a tesla involves pressing an on-screen button, which brings up a modal display, which you slide according to the speed of wiping, all while presumably it's raining outside, a time you should be focusing on the road!
That's just one method. There's also a dedicated physical button right on one of the stalks at the steering wheel. Why spread such information without pointing out there is a physical button?
And you're wrong about having to slide something on the screen to change the speed. That's not how it works. Why are you sharing opinions on things you are ignorant about?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rr_XzzJ6gc it's not precisely a slide, but it's buttons placed in a sequence with a sliding animation.
Physical buttons and knobs and switches that don’t move can be learned by muscle memory alone, and even the ones you need to look down for, that takes an order of magnitude less time and concentration to deal with a physical switch over a digital icon.
There are plenty of features that are fine to be behind a touchscreen, but there are some that just need to be physical buttons. If they are on the steering wheel that counts! But I have never seen HVAC or defrost controls on the steering wheel. And most of what I see these days are soft switches and buttons that require looking at a screen to interpret, which is again, worse.
Touchscreens force you to take your eyes off the road. You can't fumble around and guess if you pressed the right thing or some random function. This means they are only appropriate for things that would normally be done while the car is not moving. Before someone mentions "but GPS", you should NOT be typing in GPS addresses while driving unless you're using voice. Touchscreen or not you still have to look at that screen for a pretty long time.
And I will also mention the obvious: with everything bundled on the touchscreen God forbid that one single part breaks (due to design choice [0] or simple accident). It renders a good part of the car unusable.
So yeah, I'm good with having a big cool touchscreen but this doesn't mean the basic functions have to be moved there.
[0] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
That's before we get onto the whole music thing, where I concede my cassette tape player is less fancy than your phone integrated whatever - but hey I can do volume without needing to look at anything. Similarly picking one of my 6 preset radio stations is trivial by touch with a glance for orientation.
Now, as you say Tesla has automated away a lot of the above. Some of that is a legitimate improvement, and truly effortless voice control seems like a proper upgrade. Touch screens? I suspect I'd only be convinced by trying, my prior is that they're terrible idea for the same reason typing on my touch screen is practically impossble without looking in a way that wasn't true back in the Nokia 3210 days. I could write whole texts without needing to look because I knew by feel what I was touching.
I do think that there's a lot of stuff wrong with touch screen for everything, but right now, I think Tesla has the best balance and also adds the most value. For example, the Audis that have everything touch screen, still have 3 buttons for driver seat memory. In the Model 3, you store this in a 'profile', which stores much more information, like ventilation preferences and you can store many of them.
plus in some cars HVAC controls are low on the center stack, six of one....
Then why the huge rant about buttons and knobs if I rarely need to actually touch them?
I promise that if you never need to adjust a UI consisting of buttons and knobs that it will do nothing just as well as a touchscreen. UI should be made for people who adjust their settings, though.
> Plus there are so many buttons. Buttons for functions you truly may never use!
They won't bite.
Example, 2017 Chevrolet Volt. Center stack UI was nice to look at it but many options required multi level drill downs to change. HVAC controls were at the bottom of the center stack. Forty plus buttons between steering wheel and center console and this does not count all functions on stalks. Z4 I had had three stalks and forty plus buttons with heated seats at bottom of center stack and under.
Touch screens like anything else in the car that a user interact with can be bad or good.I found Apple Car Play when used on the Volt to be obnoxious and far more requiring me to take my eyes off the road.
I keep emphasizing one thing that people keep ignoring. You rarely if ever have to use the touchscreen at all. Almost every setting is set and forget. You catch glimpses of the navigation and such from normal eye movement. let alone, lets get real silly here, the TM3 can drive itself in traffic just fine if I wanted to get stupid and take my eyes off the road.
Similarly the defrost is not automatic and the button requires a precision tap.
There are a couple of reasons you might need to actually use the controls in a car with some regularity.
I would rephrase to "UI should be made for users who interface with them", and I could not agree more with your response.
Rich people who can afford Teslas may have a safe driving experience in isolation but the vast majority (who can't afford a Tesla) are stuck with a poorly designed touch interface, making road conditions less safe for everyone (even Tesla drivers with their perfect touch interfaces), through no fault of their own.
Bring back the knobs.
You can't use a touchscreen without looking at it constantly. Full stop.
What happens when the wiper sensor malfunctions - now you're scrambling to find the manual controls to shut the damn thing off (if you even can!) Maybe it wipes faster or slower than you prefer. Same thing goes for headlamps.
For every "automatic" system you add to a vehicle, that is just one more thing that can malfunction and I find car repairs to be the most gigantic waste of time and money.
Look, we've proved out the whole "button" concept, and it just works. It's super easy and cheap to replace when it breaks. My car is not a toy, it is a utility. I want the features from the expensive "toy" cars to stay the hell away from my vehicle.
But I agree, with driving being so hazardous to health I would certainly be willing to pay more for a vehicle that has a significantly improved accident survivability.
So, uh, he ran into a deer even with the sensors.
We could give the benefit of the doubt and say maybe the sensors slammed the brakes when the deer was on the road and did so before he could ever react but I doubt it.
The knobs are great - one for temperature, one for fan speed, one for outlet (crank to the right to defrost), a fourth for volume, and the fifth scrolls through a list which is less important but still better than buttons.
The toggles with twisty ends are great too. Intuitive control of lights, wipers, and cruise control, and standardized over almost every manufacturer. Window toggles, also great, I assume Tesla has them to raise and lower windows.
Buttons have a bit of a breakdown. 15 of them are for the stereo, and mostly rarely used. Each of the knobs has a button in the middle, they're very handy (turn AC/Recirculate/etc on and off). And the mirror adjust is the remaining buttons, sure it could be on a screen with the rarity with which I use it - but I prefer physical buttons.
So overall, you could cut out 15ish buttons on the media console and replace with a touch screen, and I would be quite happy. But if you took my knobs for adjusting temperature, volume, etc I would be quite unhappy. This means that most modern non-entry-level cars make me unhappy.
I often set a volume level that feels right just before parking my car after getting home at the same time everybody else does. The same volume feels incredible loud when getting back to the car early in the morning.
The same goes with climate control. I can get to my car after a long run in that case I'll likely need a colder temperature than what I need after coming back to the cinema.
I find myself adjusting volume and climate often in different situations. I have an old car and use mecanical switches. Going to a touchscreen to me would be a step backwards.
I guess that when you already had touchscreens, it's much easier to sell haptic interfaces as an improvement than when you avoided touchscreen from the beginning. "Still no touchscreens" vs "already beyond touchscreens", even when they have the exact same controls.
It's not only the superiority of physical buttons, carmakers seem to be bad at simple, distraction-free UI.
- A single UI task (cancel navigation, switch radio station) takes 4-6 screen presses through some dialogs/menus that have only one option
- the thing responds too slow, there are some superfluous animations and in general there's long delays between presses and feedback on the screen that you touched something.
- Random crashes when not doing anything besides driving
- Random crashes (more frequently) when using android auto or making phone calls
- Updating the software takes 30 minutes, during which no information is shown besides a randomly resetting progress bar.
Compare with the Renault Captur which I could never learn to use without having to look at where I have to tap on the screen.
Edit: while driving, I'm not doing things in the onboard system that I haven't done before, like browsing through settings and other things. I'm only interested in doing modifications to already running things or turning on/off certain systems while driving, and those were much easier to get learned under muscle control when having a radial than using touch controls (which with touch I never managed to actually learn).
I guess an easy way to compare them would be to say, going from navigation to Spotify would require me to:
(radial): drag radial down, three clicks to the right, and click
(touchscreen): find button about 10cms from the left without looking or any tactic feedback
That's also why you don't program on a tablet, even with a bt keyboard. Task switching is way to slow, not enough info directly accessible and multi tasking sucks.
I dare you to go tell that to /r/apple :)
In all seriousness, too many of my Mac-loving friends and coworkers are using laptops that're 4+ years old because Apple decided shaving a millimeter off the thickness was worth cutting key travel by 60% and having display hinges crack off the frame. Considering how long most of them have been buying Apple they deserve better treatment.
Have you seen photos of a 737 Max cockpit...
https://www.google.com/search?q=737+max+cockpit&tbm=isch
Compare it with a
737-200 cockpit:
However, there are aircraft avionics with touch screens, for example:
https://www.avidyne.com/products/ifd/index.html
[1] I'm a private pilot so I'm pretty familiar with the state of the art in aircraft avionics, but I don't fly a 737.
If recent business jets are an indication, it's all touch based at the high end already. Also, Ipads are getting pretty popular for pilots. My understanding is that most pilots would bring one by default (two plus extra batteries typically) and that especially for GA, there is a lot of equipment and software that integrates with them. One odd thing is that some pilots use ipads to control equipment in the plane because of UI and UX issues. E.g. you can control a garmin 530 with an ipad and it seems like pilots prefer doing that because it is just easier.
I think both in cars and in the aviation industry there is the notion that the companies manufacturing UIs there are not necessarily that good at it because historically their focus was more hardware oriented. The UX of especially older equipment can be kind of clunky. E.g. many planes have an fms (flight management system) with a non qwerty keyboard that looks like it was designed in the nineteen sixties and just never updated. You still find the same design in relatively new planes like the A319.
I agree that it is nice to have physical controls for some thing. E.g. I love volume dials. But overall, touch is great when hardware designs result in very complex UX.
So, I suspect that Mazda getting rid of touchscreens is more their own inability to do good UI than any inherent problems with touch screens. The rest of the industry seems to be trying to catch up to Tesla. I recently sat in a very new Renault with Android Car and a big touch screen. It's a very nice upgrade from the previous generation which was very clunky to use and had lots of annoying bugs. Renault outsourcing the UI to a company that has a clue was a big improvement for them they were just hopelessly out of their depth.
I absolutely love my touch screen in my Honda and never felt unsafe because of it. All the controls for changing songs, volume, voice, etc are on the steering wheel via touch dials or a few buttons.
It’s not like the car (or airplane) companies aren’t aware of this.
Apple were the first people to deploy high quality capacitive multi touch screens to the general public, with a gesture UI underneath for things like pinch zoom. This was an amazing improvement over previous handheld systems.
IT fashions usually work that way - there is an actually useful killer application and suddenly the technologies used by the killer application must be applied to everything. Peer to peer (Napster), Ruby / "static typing sucks, testing is better" (Ruby on Rails), touchscreens (iPhone), JavaScript (one language for client and server), blockchain (bitcoin / getting rich through speculation), deep learning (great solution to SOME problems) - it's a fairly simple pattern.
Also, the car industry has looong product cycles, so what you see now is what was hot 5-ish years ago.
While I don't disagree with your main point, I have to say that this is wrong.
That's what fashion literally is. Everybody wears clothes and so clothes are sold to the entire population of the planet. Yet we don't dress like in the 60's anymore. Maybe some do, but you definitely can't find big masses of people dressing like in the early 1800's, for example.
It is interesting that you may in certain countries not operate a cell phone while driving, yet you can operate a car touch screen.
Air plane systems are for example Garmin GPS 430
I only touch the screen when not driving. It’s not hard.
Here is an image of what I'm referring to: https://rocketry.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/orion-capsule.j...
Whereas on the SpaceX consoles even the message 'All systems nominal' is rendered in a pale blue colour that merges in with the muted pastel palette. I challenge readers to find it quickly.
But Mazda's cockpit isn't plane cockpit either. Please go for a test drive with new Mazda 3 and you will be surpised how stupid is this decision.
If you want to volume up, change a song, yes, it is easy.
But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look at screen and turn the wheel at the same time) - find where is a navi (by turning the wheel and pressing it, still looking at the screen) - choose, again with the wheel, to start typing your destination - and what most: again with wheel (turning it and pressing) type the address simultaneously looking on an onscreen keyboard.
All that while not looking on the road and holding your steering wheel with one hand and another on navigation wheel on central canal.
How come this is safer by tapping on the screen?!
Voice output that spells is silly (as is Google's navigation, which overwhelms you with information you do not need).
Maybe voice commands are just not ready for polish (guessing Szczepańska is polish) but seems to work fine for at least english and spanish.
Granted, I was a child map reader and navigator for my parents, this isn’t easy for humans either.
As for key presses to navigate a menu you would be surprised how quickly a human memorized exactly how many times to press what buttons to get to where they want to go. In my current car I know that if I press Home, down x3, and OK I will end up in the Media menu. I can do all this without taking mu eyes off the road (or even thinking about it much after a year+ with this vehicle.
Wow, well put! This is definitely something that we lost with the current gen of interfaces, and this articulation didn't occur to me.
Losing keypresses or clicks/touches at random, unpredictable freezes and/or delays on interactions, all this contributes to a general sense of unreliability and not being able to infer the state of the device. Consistency is actually a much more important metric than just plain latency.
The reality is, people will be adjusting their radios while they drive. They will be looking for open restaurants, changing their destination, and a number of other things while driving, and pretending like they're not worth accommodating ignores some very fundamental principles on the topic of economics.
When you design something, you don't design for ideal use, you design to eliminate risky misuse. This is a core axiom of user interface design. It's not good enough to just slap a warning disclaimer on it, as the designer, you're still liable.
I would have my engineering licence revoked if I ignored possible avenues of misuse, could design them out but didn't, and then ended up in court because they misused it and someone died. This isn't a hypothetical, this is how it works in the non-software world where engineering decisions can routinely kill people.
I think this just proves there are no safe manual interfaces for setting a navigation destination. Drivers should use a voice interface or stop the vehicle in a safe location.
The screen is touch enabled but I cannot remember the last time I actually touched it.
There is no safe way to interface with a screen while driving. You are taking your eyes off the road, and your focus goes with it necessarily. The safest option is no screens. It's the only reason I would never get a Tesla. If it's mission critical it needs to be physical.
It's different in a plane, because you can safely take your eyes off the sky. In fact flying by instruments only is routinely the only choice; night time, weather. So a glass cockpit/touch screen controls make sense there. But even then the key controls are still physical.
I don't think I have particularly dangerous friends and family, but they rarely do.
When I'm in the front passenger seat, dealing with the GPS and the A/C becomes my responsibility.
Your sarcasm looks a lot less smart once you examine the actual options.
Things like that. Maybe after few years you will memorize parts of this.
I am not telling resignation from touchscreens is bad. Just Mazda didn't offer anything useful instead of it.
Media buttons on the steering wheel were peak car usability. What is there really to be looking at other than the road while you drive? A map at best, but we can do better there too. A HUD of upcoming turns projected onto the glass for example. We had HUDs in cars in 1989 (Nissan Silvia) and some modern cars are bringing it back. I think that's the perfect blend of usability without compromising safety.
The other user said you had to design for what people will do; disabling all access and removing the choice to interact is exactly doing that. Disabling hands-on interaction above a certain speed but allowing voice controls might be another option.
What does that have to do with anything? The touchscreen controls for most of that aren't even enabled when driving.
But on the Mazda you can't even do these things with the touchscreen while NOT driving.
To me, its a situation of throwing out the good with the bad.
Some interfaces it’s pretty clear that they are best served by physical buttons, toggles, switched, etc. Blinkers, gear selector, volume, windows, for example.
Some interfaces it’s equally clear that they are best served by touch. Text input through an on screen keyboard obviously beats a scroll wheel to select individual letters. Likewise panning and zooming a map.
Now, whether some of these interfaces are being operated while parked or driving is actually a completely separate matter. As you note, any touch feature can be dynamically locked out from operating while in drive. But to answer that question you can’t take the position of a nanny chastising a child. You have to take a holistic view of what actual users in the real world will do based on your decisions.
So, navigation is a great example. People need to navigate while driving. Sometimes that means interacting with the navigation interface while under way, whether it’s due to updating a route, checking for traffic, zooming in and out. As much as you might like to, car designers don’t get to choose whether drivers are going to do this activity while driving. They can provide an interface that is as safe and convenient as possible, or drivers will just use their phones instead.
Every car nav system I ever used, including fairly recent Audi and Mercedes ones, that depended on physical buttons for input was universally terrible. So bad that it wasn’t worth using and so the phone was used instead.
Compared to the Tesla Model 3 nav system which is fully touch, highly responsive, and beautifully rendered. It is a total joy to use and increases overall safety through large touch affordances which make sense for the driving environment. And it’s so easy to activate I almost always have my destination plugged in, which means the car is showing me upcoming traffic and helping me avoid accidents through alternate routes, which is also increasing safety and decreasing overall traffic congestion.
You say people need to interact with navigation while driving, which is simply not true. People want to interact with navigation while driving. They could cope without it. We didn't even have navigation all that long ago, to say we need it is a stretch let alone to touch it while driving. If it's causing accidents, and it is, it should be considered dangerous. Perhaps the Model 3 is better at it, but it is still a danger to look away from the road even for a second or two.
That means screens are out, and we need better ways to display and interact with information while driving. HUDs, sounds or feel is all I will agree is safe.
Whether that external source is a sticky note on the steering wheel, a phone, audible prompts, or a big touchscreen in the center of the vehicle (TM3), the driver is going to decide which to use based on the options available to them at the time.
What the driver is not going to do is pull over at an exit to stop the car and check if that was the exit they were supposed to take, and then get back on the highway and keep going.
The absolutist stance does not actually increase safety. In the absolutist stance, well people don’t need to drive at all. To design safe systems in the real world that save lives you need to provide an alternative that is both safer and as easy to use. Because a safer alternative that drivers don’t use by choice because it’s too annoying or inconvenient doesn’t actually improve overall fleet safety.
Obviously when you operate a vehicle you don’t always just look straight out in front of you. You check your mirrors. You check your blind spots. You maintain situational awareness and do that safely by planning where you focus your attention from one moment to the next. Screens are obviously not “out”, nor is it correct to say that looking at a screen while driving is unsafe. Instruments, whether for navigation or simply indicating current vehicle status such as fuel, speed, lights, etc. are an integral part of driving and digital instruments are not necessarily less safe than analog, and can potentially be more safe.
And so returning to my original point, in my personal experience, the large touchscreen in the TM3 is ideally suited for safe navigation, and improves safety when navigating particularly on an unknown route, by presenting crucial information in extremely visible and usable form, and allowing me to configure and interact with the system naturally and efficiently while I proceed along my route.
Funny you should say that, its exactly what people did not too long ago.
You'd look up where you were going in a key map or more broadly a road atlas, write down your instructions (and keep it open to the final destination in case of road closures, etc)
I really don't see the appeal of getting in a car and beginning to drive without knowing where you're going. "I'll look it up on the road" just seems like an intersection of anxiety (deliberately increasing your chance of crashing), annoyance (deliberately making your navigational search harder to perform), and apprehension (increasing the chance you'll miss a crucial turn early in the trip due to lack of navigation).
It's like choosing to juggle while taking a test.
The absolutist stance could absolutely increase safety. If we ditched all screens cars could only be safer. Less convenient, but safer. I'm not saying ditch navigation or music though, but ditching off to the side navigation/media screens could only be a plus to safety. Implement navigation and media in a way that's more sympathetic to the need of remaining attentive. Any lapse in attention we can get rid of is a good one.
You haven't argued for how having screens could be safer than not having screens, only for how to improve the safety and convenience of screens we have. Your advice is probably going to be more useful, because in all likelihood we'll keep screens. But I wouldn't care if it took someone 45 minutes longer to get somewhere because they got lost, and had to pull over and ask a man sitting on a bench for directions. Driving is a privilege and we shouldn't trade safety for convenience. I think media/navigation screens could be replaced by better solutions that don't require a screen. Who says you need a full visual map at all? Who says you need to type in the address? These are problems that could be addressed, and I feel as though the screen is the lowest effort solution not the right one.
Yes we did, even if it wasn't an electronic system built into the car, and it wasn't unheard of for people to pull out physical maps and reference them while driving, or pull over and stop in unsafe locations to reference maps. N Electronic navigation systems are what make people less likely to do those things. There's a difference between introducing a digital tool and introducing the activity it supports.
> Sometimes that means interacting with the navigation interface while under way, whether it’s due to updating a route, checking for traffic, zooming in and out.
You shouldn't be fiddling with the navigation system while driving - you should do that while you're still in park. Even when I look down at my phone to see what lane I need to be in for a second, it's amazing how much distance passes when going at highway speeds. Unless you are using autopilot, it's dangerous to mess around with the map, and it's not that hard to pull over to do it, either.
Understanding what lane I need to be in, and what the traffic conditions are up ahead around the bend; these things add to situational awareness that makes driving safer. But I'm just not going to use a shit GPS that I need to program an address by spinning a scroll wheel and individually selecting letters.
If you had a large touchscreen in your car, you wouldn't have to look down at a tiny phone screen to see these things. They would be in your peripheral vision and easily checked without losing track of the road.
Now I regularly move to the right and slow down long before approaching a traffic jam on the highway, versus the typical hard-brake when the traffic comes into view.
At an unfamiliar complex intersection (greater than 4-way), sometimes you can't figure out where the GPS wants you to go. A quick pinch-zoom before the light turns can give you the visual queue you need to avoid having to make a last minute decision as you enter the intersection. That's totally possible on the TM3 because it's instant, smooth, and fluid (and it's really great at automatically zooming back out to the right level as you start driving again).
And to give another anecdote, today on my drive home navigation was set to take me 'Home' (by the way that's two taps on the screen, and takes less than 1 second to activate as soon as you sit down in the car). I was on the highway in stop-and-go traffic with AutoPilot. My wife called and asks me to pickup takeout. I know it's too early to order, and traffic is terrible. I need to know how long to wait to order, so I tap the steering wheel control and use voice control to change the destination. Because it's internet connected, I can just speak the restaurant name and the town. It tells me the traffic-aware arrival ETA so I know when to place the order, and adjusts the route (taking an earlier exit). Unfortunately there's no single tap on screen to make the call - POIs don't have the phone numbers listed (yet)!
So I find that there are plenty of perfectly appropriate reasons to adjust navigation while driving, I just think very few people have experienced how a proper large touch-screen implementation can supplement and enhance your situational awareness and allow you to complete tasks safely and efficiently while underway. The is strictly better than the real-world alternative which is for people to try to complete these tasks using a phone-in-hand while they are also attempting to drive.
Seems like a usability problem. Google Maps displays what lanes go in what directions so you don't have to zoom in on the map and will speak it to you so you don't even have to look at your phone/Android Auto/etc.
It is also supposed to give you POI info including the phone and working hours if you tap on any POI bubble on the screen, but it doesn't work for some reason.
I am thinking on their new (soon) CX-30 as a possible new car as I loved the CX-5 and was told it would be mostly be based on the Mazda3.
https://images.hgmsites.net/lrg/2019-mazda-mazda3_100689497_...
You don't even need to look down to do it, because after 10 minutes of driving in your car, you've memorized the buttons.
Did you miss the part where they said they will be projecting an HUD onto the windshield so drivers won't have to look down? Your comment is arguing against a solution Mazda did not propose.
Curiously, most of the people who are defending touchscreens in this thread are not addressing the 2 safety issues brought up - inadvertent torque applied by drivers and inattention to the road ahead.
whether you're looking down or forward, you're spending your attention looking at the HUD, not the road or any other sensor.
The reality is that people prefer more features than less, and buttons are not the best way.
What you probably hate are old, unresponsive automotive touch screens.
The future will use more microphones, be faster, use AI to predict what you want to do, etc....
But this seems like a "pop opinion", popular on the internet, but little basis in reality.
I would argue its not a best in class feature, its a liability.
The big touch-screen is a reason why I would not buy a Tesla. The reasons to buy one are economy and performance. Hell, the Prius might have actually been a decent car if it didn't look like a shoe, sound like an overburdened vacuum cleaner, and handle like a beluga whale.
Umm, I guess you haven't see the FAA-approved Garmin G3X Touch:
First off their system takes an eternity to cold boot. If I’m making a quick run to the store or dropping the kids off at a friends house the system isn’t available for most of the ride. While it’s booting, the radio remembers what it last did but all the controls including volume are locked. So if I was listening to one of the comedy channels on Sirius I have no way to mute it or turn down the volume of the often inappropriate content for a few minutes if my kids get in the car.
Second the system remembers very little of the settings between drives. For example the heated/ vented seats or the auto-hold braking feature have to be set every drive.
I just drove a brand new Ford Fusion rental this week and their system while much clunkier did boot up almost immediately upon starting the car. Of course nothings perfect and while Ford did include hard buttons for most of the HVAC controls you still had to go though the touchscreen menus to find the setting to change the vent control to head and feet.
I'm probably going to buy a santa fe because hyundai did a great job with infotainment and there is physical buttons everywhere. Plus, the ergonomics are great.
I do definitely find it annoying that it defaults to playing whatever audio source you last used when you start up your car. Whenever I have a passenger, I have a slight moment of panic as I try to remember what's about to play through the speakers, and whether it's appropriate for them to hear.
Mazda punches far above its price in terms of driving dynamics and interior quality, but I think their infotainment system is plain garbage and they should be absolutely ashamed of such poor quality.
As opposed to what? Hasn't that been the default behavior since cars have had radios in them?
Every car I drove with auto-hold requires you to enable it after each startup of the car. Pretty sure it's a safety thing, as this makes most basic thing (depressing break) behave differently than it did for all automatic cars for the last 50 years.
Touchscreens can make sense for things where you need to have a flexible interface and cannot afford your physical interface to look like the cockpit of an airplane.
But for everything that is even a tiny bit critical you usually want to avoid it if possible. This is why even 50k€ cinema cameras like the Arri Alexa swear on knobs and buttons.
The things with buttons, levers and knobs is that they are expensive and very few designers/engineers are good at designing interfaces with them – either because they are not creative enough to get the optimal solution or because they are not pragmatic enough to test their creative solution to the core.
Yamaha DX7, one of the best-selling synths of all time, didn't have any knobs or sliders to edit its sounds. People loved the sounds, but editing them was so hard that few musicians did - that's why you can hear many DX7 stock presets in 80's music.
The 90's were the dark ages of the synth. Even the buttons went away, everything was in a menu now.
The synths thrived as virtual instruments, where adding knobs and sliders was cheap.
Fast forward to 2010's. Arturia, a big virtual synth maker, said: you know what? People love knobs, let's give them knobs. They made Minubrute and Microbute - and it was a smash hit.
Today, there are a plethora of synths out there, and you can program them all with knobs and sliders. For some (like Mini/Microbrute), there is no screen; for others (like Korg Mini/Monologue) it's non-essential, and you do everything with knobs and sliders anyway.
Modern professional gear no only does away with touchscreens, it pretty much does away with screens to a large extent. And where the screens are used, the menu-diving with minimal.
Because when you make things done, you want to interface in your muscle memory. And you don't want to be looking at things - screens in particular - to interact with them.
So if the maker of my $300 can figure this out and put over a dozen knobs on the device to control every single thing it does, I hope that the maker of a $30,000 car can do the same thing as well.
And it wouldn't have been much easier to program, because it used a novel form of sound generation which most people still find hopelessly unintuitive.
A Germany company made a programming box for the DX7 with one-knob-per-feature. It was very expensive and sold very badly, even among professionals who could easily afford one - which suggests that the market for programmability really wasn't there, even with knobs.
People don't care about knobs. What they care about is simplicity. Synths like the Microbrute require virtually no mental effort. The sound design model is so simple virtually anyone of average intelligence can learn it in an afternoon. Within a few days they'll know most of what there is to know - which is how to make the same few stock sounds that analog synthesizers have been making since the 1970s.
This is fine for beginners but experts find it very limiting. Brian Eno loves his DX7, and the fact that you can set up the envelopes to make quasi-generative noises is a big part of the appeal. Most people don't get that far with it, but those that do aren't going to be happy with the very obvious limitations of a Microbrute.
Touch screens in cars are more complex. Having a map in a car is a useful thing, and there's no muscle memory. It's hard to see how you can replace drag/touch to set a destination with buttons that are less annoying and more intuitive.
But IME the big problem with touch screens is that they don't work. The screen in my car is resistive, so I have to keep poking at it to get a touch to register. The hybrid design - two rows of soft buttons, one knob, one screen - would be fine if the touch part actually worked.
I am absolutely in love with the Yamaha Reface DX that I have, and greatly enjoy editing and the real-time controls over the parameters that it offers with its mere 4 touch sliders.
I think the direct control boxes didn't sell well because not enough keyboardists grokked FM well enough to mess with the sound live (and didn't expect to learn) -- and also because nobody loves add-on boxes. A better UI, I think would change things. Again, that's a lot of what makes the Reface DX fun.
In any case, perhaps the DX is not the best example here. A better example would be the many 90-s and early 2000-s synths, which were all about menus and you couldn't do anything immediately.
(Microkorg would also fall into that category, its knobs are deceptive: what each knob does depends on the value of two or so others knobs. It's menus but without screens. And it's a VA synth - no reason it couldn't be more like Roland Gaia which is one-knob-per-parameter).
But I wouldn't hold it against advanced users if they want a more tactile experience.
I hated synths in the 90s. All interaction was funneled through a tiny screen. I called it "building a ship in a bottle."
Now several manufacturers have brought back knobs (and even patch cords!) and it's a much better situation.
I fully agree with your comment, and just wanted to say thanks for the metaphor :) I'm absolutely stealing it.
Perfect example: I have a pair of noise-cancelling headphones which let you change volume and switch tracks by swiping on a touch-sensitive earpiece. It's mind-boggling to me that this was chosen over knobs and buttons: first of all it's really easy to accidentally trigger the controls when adjusting the headset. Also, since it's situated in such a way that you can't see it while you're operating it, it's exactly the type of interface which would benefit most from tactile feedback.
None of this bullshit, where buttons are far from each other, moving hands up and down left and right to change temperature, turn air-conditioning on/off. Where driver needs to glance down to steer hand into damn buttons. Where "infotainment" needs to show you anything at all about what you are listening to - as if you dont hear it. Keep information to a minimum, ffs.
Then we got touchscreens instead - now you cant even drive in full darkness and feel some buttons with your hand to adjust. There is not even a Night Mode.
Are car manufacturers really this bad? Yep. Tesla included.
Day: https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/201...
Night: https://cdn-vox--cdn-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/cdn.vox-cdn....
The Saab 9-3 had a "Night" button, which when pressed, turned off _every_ light-source except for speed-odometer. There should be no information visible, no glow on anything, other than speedometer, and even it lowers its brightness.
Why though? Try it, if you get the chance, the fatigue I feel after driving with night mode in a Saab vs shitty cars, is exceptionally low. Eye-strain, whats that?
Sorry, I just picked the first image I found on Google images.
To be sure, driving the TM3 at night is sheer joy. There’s no screen at all in front of your face. Just the road and a dark steering wheel. I find night vision much improved without having any indicators behind the steering wheel at night.
In my opinion, this screen still looks excessively bright, distracting, and the night-time photo really showcases the screen's inability to accurately display dark colors (black still looks washed-out or gray).
The screen is quite high quality in my opinion, and not washed out at all. You’re seeing the effect from the camera washing out from the street lights.
See how dark the steering wheel is? No screen behind the wheel makes for sublime night time driving. It’s just you and the road, and silence.
Later I had a bunch of rentals with touchscreen Android Auto, and it was less convenient and less safe than rotary dial Android Auto.
I wish Audi would've kept the rotary dial when they added a touchscreen in their latest infotainment revision.
It's simply not optimised for usability but for attractiveness (both cost and aesthetic wise)
I suppose having smooth glass can make the screen look slightly more crisp, but having a bright reflection of everything in the room erases any gains in clarity.
The only reason GM’s is best is because they’ve finally acquiesced and admitted that Apple and Google do it better and their UX reflects that
I missed reading this part of the article:
"The head-up display that top trims of the Mazda 3 get is now projected onto the windshield. The amount of time it takes the eyes to focus on the head-up display is greatly reduced because it’s now focused on a point 7.5 feet ahead of the driver."
Funny thing. I have a newer car with a touch screen interface. I also had an older Civic which someone recently destroyed. So with the insurance money, I bought an early 2000's Accord. The previous owner had installed a new Bluetooth radio. No touch screen. Lots of buttons.
At least for entertainment, it's way better than any touch screen interface I've used.
It has buttons for FM presets - the thing I missed most with the touchscreen interfaces. And no, I don't want to scroll like crazy to get to the right preset using a knob or steering wheel. I know what station I want to go to, and it's so much better if I simply have to press a button without looking. Random access FTW.
Every Bluetooth interface I've seen in touchscreen cars has this flaw: Say I was listening to a podcast or some music. I decide I don't want to listen to it so I hit pause (there is no "stop" icon). I also have Waze running, and its volume is too low (very often the case that Waze's volume and the podcast's differ too much, so you can't use both simultaneously). I increase the volume so I can listen to Waze, and the music/podcast resumes playing! Why? Why on Earth would anyone want this feature where adjusting the volume means "Play"?
My 3rd party Bluetooth radio doesn't do stupid things like that.
And then the time to connect to Bluetooth. It takes too long in every touchscreen entertainment system. With the 3rd party radio, it's blazingly fast.
Lots of other cool things about the 3rd party tactile Bluetooth/radio. I rarely drive my newer 2015 car. It has nothing going for it over my old Accord (well, except possibly safety - but that touchscreen is making things unsafe...)
Volvo is perhaps the ultimate example in good UI for the AC: the buttons are shaped like a human, and you press the part of your body where you want air:
http://www.carkhabri.com/Gallery/volvo/volvo-xc60/interior/l...
I was driving a friend's newer car down the freeway once, and had to call him to find out how to turn on the godam defroster. There were so many knobs, switches, and dials that influence this, all labelled with icons so I had no idea what they did. Turns out that you had to push two buttons, toggle a toggle, and turn two knobs. Madness.
My car has a selector that you move to "defrost". Then it defrosts, like magic.
ATM it's still a co-pilot job to translate navigation system information into actionable directions in foreign cities..
Would be really interesting, especially with cars like Tesla that do OTA updates and can improve your "co-pilot" all the time.
It's nice, but it still a major issue: you need to look at it while pressing it to know state.
If, instead, it's three stacked buttons top to bottom, you don't have to do that.
In a car, the aim should be for logical use without eyes leaving the road much.
> And the last thing I need in my car is phone interface.
Not the target audience for the phone integration features...
It all comes down to being a responsible rider/driver
I _used_ to wear a smart watch (all of the first 3 iterations of the Pebble) because I thought it would be useful to know who's calling when I can feel my phone buzzing in my pocket while riding so I can decide whether to pull over and answer it or not. Turns out the answer is alway "no". Either I'm jus commuting and I can choose to call back (or not) when I get to my destination, or I'm on the road and I don't care that I won't get to it for several hours or more.
I'm pretty good at navigating - so I don't want/miss the gps/mapping thing. On trips I'd _much_ rather just turn down roads I've never been on that look like they're headed kinda the right way, and see where I end up. If I need to, I'll check in on the phone when I fuel up every 2-3 hours - but it's pretty rare for me to end up somewhere with no idea of which direction and at least a rough guess of how far away the place I'm headed to is.
I do sometimes listen to music - using in ear headphones that fit under my helmet. I'll _occasionally_ use that for turn-by-turn navigation to if I'm trying to get somewhere in town I've never been before in a place I'm not familiar enough to dead-reckon myself close enough that I can get to a place where I'll get by on remembered landmarks and street names.
We're revealing too much to google and God knows who else.
Sometimes I wonder what the endgame is. When all things (and people) have had as many iPads as can possibly fit shoved into every opening, and I need only mutter a desire for an Amazon drone[0] to appear to satiate it... what will I actually /do/?
[0] Which may or may not be a person...
I stopped using it after a while. I don't mind listening to the radio. And although Android Car has a nice modern user interface, the default user interface in my car works just as fine. I want to look at it as little as possible.
> not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."
Branded interface was not the right wording here. I was looking for a word that describes a car company building a good and fitting experience that suits the car you are driving.
Do I need a book a time slot in my calendar for going to the hardware store?
The key issue for me is, if I'm driving, I have to look at a touch-screen to hit the right button. With physical controls, I can use muscle memory and keep my eyes on the road.
On the contrary I recently plugged my phone into the USB port of a hired Peugeot 207. All I wanted to do was charge it. But every few seconds the phone and in-car functions were interrupted by native pop-ups stating "No Android Auto compatible apps found". Constantly for the whole journey when I was trying to use my phone for navigation.
This can be privacy-violating, as if any kind of syncing happens, a whole bunch of your personal data is now in the car:
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/01/30/car-ren... * https://www.privacy4cars.com/home/default.aspx
If you rent cars somewhat regularly, than a USB car charger may be a worth considering:
Less than 1% of my car trips would have ever been in a calendar...
When I asked him why they didn't replace the existing 3 position switch (down/halfway/up) with a 3 position "go down/stay where you were/go up" and just count the revs and remember them, he looked completely blank.
The idea that the people building these UIs are actually interested in actual safe UX is misguided. UX is irrelevant, UI has to be sexy in the showroom.
Neither Apple or Google want the manufacturers to put in knobs and switches, because then they'll have to adapt their partially neutered existing iOS/Android UIs to support things like CANbus etc. Plus the integration costs will go up and nobody got time for that.
In fairness, there's a lot to be said about limited options. The benefit of the 3 position switch is simply that the user doesn't have to think about what the "optimal" position is. Moving the antenna up and down goes from selecting one of 3 numbers, to hitting a button to make a floating point number increase, and then hit another button to stop it on the right position. I personally don't think that's a good UX for the majority of people. (Heck, I'm not even sure what the point of a 3 position antenna is!)
Feedback could be visual and in extreme cases audible. Input should be tactile, so buttons rather than surfaces.
And screens should display only a little bit of information, in a font large enough that you don't end up straining your eyes when you switch from the road to the screen and back.
A lot of the things that drive a poor experience with a touch screen are, imho, directly because they have such a poor implementation of a touch screen. Mainly, it's _slow_, _very slow_. A touch screen has to be very fast to seem like it's working, and in a car (in particular), it _must_ feel instant or it will feel like it's broken and cause distraction. I would be very interested to see some sort of apples-to-apples comparision (a good touch experience, vs a good tactile experience), but Mazda's is just not good. It's not even close to the realm of "good enough" to be used as a comparison.
I would say it's more like they never tried to do a touch screen, and then called it bad so they wouldn't have to keep trying.
And... The android auto experience is 10x better than the mazda infotainment system because of access to spotify, podcasets, and _actual_ navigation. I love the loftiness of how mazda talks about what they want to do, but they're so far off of delivering what they say they want to that I don't really know what to think. It's just bad and slow.
I really good tactile experience is probably better than a really good touch experience. But Android Auto is getting close to being a really good touch experience. The Mazda infotainment is not at all close to being a good tactile experience if you want to use say, spotify, or google maps, or use it to actually get to where you want to go.
Sure Bluetooth is a thing but you dont always drive your own car and every car has their own convoluted way to do Bluetooth.
I wish Android or iPhones had multimedia related buttons somewhere on them (dont miss that lock button / slider thing Apple used to add in so you dont butt skip a song). It is much safer for me to feel out specific buttons while driving than looking down on my phone screen.
Agree that Bluetooth is a nightmare. Every Bluetooth radio wants to dig into my phone and download my contacts (and who knows what else) but all I want to do is play music. If I do this in a rental car I have to remember to figure out how to wipe the radio when I'm returning the car and already rushing to catch a plane, so I don't even bother with Bluetooth any more. It's maddening.
I miss the days I could reach for a button blindly to adjust my aircon or work the radio.
Having said that - I still like the fact that my Mazda has a touchscreen active while stopped. Entering Nav directions is way faster than with the commander knob.
How many times have you handed your phone to someone to show them and in the process both you and the person receiving accidentally made a multitude of gestures, resulting in your phone freaking out and opening all kinds of random apps/windows..
I love how the new iPhones have the "press" ability on apps to open more options. Personally I wish all interactions required a little bit more force (besides, say, scrolling). When almost half the device is responsive, it makes it all too easy to accidentally perform actions.
Does anyone know where the technology is with this? I remember seeing articles a long time ago about potential for brail via haptics in screens
They are less safe, less convenient to use than physical controls.
The manufacturers know this, but they don't care.
I believe most customers also currently like them because touchscreens are a relatively new technology, and they are a fad.
Based on my experience, Mazda needs a larger display located closer to the driver if they want to make use of touch controls without the side effects they mention. The wheel method is horribly clunky and takes more thinking to get to the control you want to adjust. It's much faster and safer I believe being able to access the control quickly and in a position that doesn't require you to take your eyes far away from the road. You still have to look at the display and process your control movements when using the dial control on the Mazda and it takes longer. Tesla has a better UI by far. If you haven't driven a Model 3 yet, I recommend doing so before commenting against touch screen UX.
Also, the vehicle has a heads-up-display projected on the windshield. The original HUD included a graphical tachometer so you could see the revs which has limited value except it looked cool and gave you some indication on when you were in boost. In a future update Mazda removed the graphical tach in the HUD citing safety as they felt the constant animating tach in the driver's field of view was a distraction. But, the tach remains displayed if you had it turned on before the update.
The voice command functionality is okay, including for the mediocre built-in navigation, once you learn the specific phrases and commands.
Last fall I upgraded to Apple CarPlay and the behaviour is the same. Touch input only works when the vehicle is stopped. There was a rumour that one of the reasons why CarPlay took so long to come to Mazda vehicles was because Mazda wanted integration with it's rotary command nob, back button, and other function buttons around the knob and on the steering wheel. Not sure if it's true, but I will say that navigating CarPlay with the knob is just fine when driving, and the physical back button allows me to navigate to the previous screen regardless of whether the previous screen is a CarPlay screen or one of the Mazda screens, which is really great.
I know some Mazda owners were upset with these limitations, complaining that it prevented the passenger from operating the screen, but that seems like a corner case.
At any rate I still think this is a great idea. Mazda came close with the generation of their infotainment systems before their current ones. You could mostly use the rotary dial and do things if you memorized how many clicks of rotation of the wheel it took and which button to press in the gutter on top of the transmission.
I think the next best thing is a voice UI to control HVAC and entertainment. The one on my 2015 Mazda 6 is pretty bad but this might force them to invest in that which would give them a competitive edge.
Touch screens in vehicles drive me nuts! Requiring the driver to divert their attention from the road makes all tablet-style interfaces a degradation of UX. In all the cars I learned to drive in, I could adjust every thermostat control as well as every audio interface completely by touch, without taking my eyes off the road.
Not to mention the software issues! In one vehicle, you literally could not turn off the radio. Your options were to press the mute button (which would only hold until you restarted your car - at which point you'd get blaring music or static) or to just turn the volume as low as you could.
And every car is now different and unpredictable! My dashboard should be a utility, not a visually stimulating video game where I need to learn every menu and submenu just to fade the audio to the rear.
All I can say is THANK GOD, Mazda. I hope all other manufacturers follow your lead.
Someone’s relationship with their car is very intimate and personal, in many ways more so then a house.
Much of the discussion I am seeing in this thread is very passionate, which confirms the above observation.
But as they always say, to each their own. But especially in non-utility cars, there very much a level of passion associated with owning a car.
1. They removed the volume knob in favour of a volume slider on the touch screen. Very difficult to use, and even after a couple of years I have not been able to get used to it, and keep reaching for a physical input.
2. There's many UI quirks (bugs and ill conceived design flows) that make menu navigation, managing saved stations, switching from AM to FM, connecting a Bluetooth device etc. extremely difficult. RDS is even disabled by default, which defeats the purpose of having all the extra real estate of the touch screen.
Lots of complaints from users, taking them years to acknowledge it sucks.
At the CHI conference about a decade ago I spoke with some of the lead HCI researchers at Mitsubishi (which has long contributed to human factors research). During Q/A they said the single best thing you could do to improve safety was to NOT buy a car with a touchscreen interface. Lack of tactile feedback is a major problem. We all were quick to point out that they were selling cars with touchscreens. The HCI researchers said yes the company did, but their point still stood.
You want to be able to do things like adjust heat and defrost without looking (just with hands).
https://photos.smugmug.com/Other/86-Citroen-DX-Prestige/i-Cv...
For what it's worth I've pretty much always known the controls to be over the center console.
And the instruments being there as well has been happening for some time, at least for some vehicle classes e.g. on the C3 picasso anything but the purely driving-related controls is on the center console: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/citroen/c3-picasso/61746/used-...
BTW, I have never used the hazard button while the car is in motion or at least driving very slowly.
I don't think I've ever seen a car where these weren't on the center console.
> BTW, I have never used the hazard button while the car is in motion or at least driving very slowly.
'round here it's common to use the hazards when in sight of or at the tail of a highway / freeway traffic jam.
Apart from some modern cars with a single dial and maybe a couple buttons there, most only have storage space there and the controls are in the front, not between the driver and passenger.
I was looking at the car system controls below the air vents, hence my wondering what the difference was.
FWIW BMW's idrive and Audi's MMI physical control are in roughly the same spot (idrive's been both below and besides the gear selector, MMI's usually been above or below though both have basically surrounded the stick: https://www.picclickimg.com/00/s/MTE1MFgxNjAw/z/xvEAAOSwll1W...).
And though recent generation MMIs are apparently touchscreen-only, BMW has retained physical controls next to the shifter: https://cdn.bmwblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/BMW-6-Ser...
Cars go out of style. They last a lot longer than a phone or tablet. Look at any 00's era GM product. The radio/climate buttons are straight out of a Cozy Coupe. It's gross, but in 2001 they were stylin'! Look at the 1992 Subaru Legacy, or the 1990 Ford Tempo, or the 1991 Nissan Sentra. Electric seatbelts, enormous speedometers, oddly shaped steering wheels... They were cool! Now they're eye-catchingly gaudy. Lets not even get into the "digital dash" (yeah, I'm talking to Jethro in the Pontiac).
What if you could have a car with a touchscreen but it only included Android Gingerbread (2.3) and that was it?
Other than that I am always amazed that modern cars have back up cameras and drive-by-wire steering/throttle/brakes but they still have a simple "check engine" light. They don't even print out their own trouble codes let alone tell you "Cylinder 5 misfire!" Such a feature would be trivial and add real value, especially in the truck market. Perhaps when right-to-repair takes over there will be no more incentive to keep the workings of cars magical and mysterious to the layman.
https://www.amazon.com/ANCEL-AD310-Enhanced-Universal-Diagno...
I rent cars fairly often for work and so I see a lot of touchscreens, a lot of bluetooth, whatnot. My car at home has a simple radio, a CD player that rarely gets used, and cruise control. I prefer that to any of this new integrated tech. The only thing about new cars that I really miss is a backup camera.
Same with an oven. Turn the dial to 350 and the oven was on and set to 350. It took a fraction of a second vs a touch screen.
These new interfaces are often a terrible use of "technology" and are actually a step (or more) backward.
But it had its drawbacks. My young children couldn't set the time to heat their oatmeal. "Turn it to 1 minute". They'd twist the knob and say "Is that enough?" Without knowing enough about time they couldn't (yet) figure out to turn right or left to get to the right number.
With a digital one, they'd just poke 1,0,0 and hit start.
Tap and swipe is first nature to him. What fascinates me is, this boy cant figure out how to turn on the tv because he keeps tapping amd swiping the remote control. I once saw him trying to swipe on the light switch as well.
It's extraordinary.
1. Using Apple iPhone for navigation. Phone rings. I pick it up using car controls. The navigation screen is now gone and is replaced with the phone screen. [scramble to swipe bottom of phone to get back to nav] 2. Audio routing. The car winds up acting like a Home theater receiver that I have to debug while driving. Why can’t I hear my music? Am I on AM/FM/IPhone USB/iPhone Bluetooth/Wife’s Bluetooth. So many options. 3. Every time I start driving my car, Christmas music starts automatically playing from my iPhone through the car speakers. It’s in my music library and for some reason it auto plays (Why apple?). I always have to do some mid-driving swipeage to get this to stop.
These are horrible patterns. I’d love to spend the rest of my life designing UI for simplifying the driving experience. If anyone wants to hire me, please do.
Others trying to imitate its screens are shooting themselves into foot. If you are not able to implement continuous delivery, you should stick to hardware toggles. It's that simple.
The problem of screen being screen still stands in Tesla's cars, but much bigger problem is shipping crappy screens.
>you should stick to hardware toggles
There we go, nothing to add now :)
Don't get me wrong -- CarPlay/Android Auto are leagues ahead of what individual car makers have to offer. Having a standard system across all car makers is a good idea too. They just need to come up with a more tactile interface.
The touch screen doesn't necessarily have to go, though -- it could simply be disabled when the vehicle is moving.
Volkswagen, for example, have a rotary dial which lets you flip through all the items on the screen to select the one you like. It still requires the driver to glance at the screen, but at least it doesn't require them to touch the precise spot on the screen -- which IMO is more distracting. That said, even the rotary dial is not perfect as it can't be operated by touch only -- w/o taking your eyes off the road -- not unless you know the position of every single icon/control by heart.
I got used to it pretty quickly and after a week or two I don't really have to look at the screen to do 99% of things I need to do. It seems much safer to me, though it was annoying at first.
The most expensive Alfa (their halo car) is a third of the price of the cheapest Rolls without any options. Ford makes a more expensive car than Alfa.
So please, maybe find a middle ground, as I said - car functionality with hardware knobs, and a touchscreen for stuff like navigation (where you need the sreen anyway), and music control. Otherwise it will get worse - then I can use the hardware button to select my BT input an dhave to fiddle around on my much smaller phone screen. No one can actually want that, if the alternative is to use a condensed version of that interface on a bigger screen...
For complicated things while driving - that you wish you had a touchscreen to accomplish - I wish you wouldn't do them while driving. I say this after more than a decade working responding to road accidents.
However, the Mazda interface has been great for all the Android Auto functions (including Google maps and Spotify) simply using the physical buttons. They clearly went to some effort to make it work well.
And if you prefer, you can use voice controls fairly effectively via Android Auto or Apple carplay.
Please keep your eyes on the road.
If you want to get excited about this type of stuff, I highly recommend this TED talk[1].
[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lTOxHxHFjwJXeCLROAPf6OJD...
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_s...
I can easily tune through all 150+ stations very easily to find a particular station. I can switch up 20 stations with a single twist, without looking. Also since stations are grouped, I can set a preset for each type of station, then easily tune up or down to listen to other related stations.
My wife's XM is a honda touch screen. The presets work ok, except they are touch screen so you have to look at the screen to change presets. But if you want to manually go to another station, you have to hit 2 touch buttons to get to a tuning screen. Then you have to hit the up/down tuning button each time you want to go up or down a single station. It is pretty much impossible to try to find a station if you don't already know the number because it could be 100's of touches.
My wife switches between Spotify, the Music app and a separated radio app. She does it on her phone's screen when at stop, she could do it on CarPlay or the android version, but I can't just imagine how it would work without a generic touch interface.
You use case (listening to radio) is in line with the current UI paradigm, other use cases (using apps) just won't work with it. That's where we could find a tradeoff I think.
Also, when the touch-screens break they tend to be much more expensive to fix. I listened to one person say they were quoted $7k to fix one. They were of a conspiratorial mindset, so they thought it was a planned obsolescence feature to help convince someone to buy a new car instead. I don't know if that's true but the idea of a that type of reliability cost is enough to keep me from returning to the same manufacturer.
Also have a 2016 Model S, and the bluetooth works much better on the Mazda, as far connecting and using a cellphone quickly.
I took in my Mazda3 to have the screen replaced. There was an issue with the sensors that mistakenly thought someone was touching the screen. At low speeds, when the toch screen re-activates, it would start navigating on its own; from changing music stations to calling people and changing GPS waypoints. Drivers trying to stop this will be more distracted than they otherwise would be. This happens at stop signs, red lights and slow-moving traffic.
And, as you said, she immediately began fooling with it, trying to get it to stop. I had to tell her "Let me do this! You just drive!" Its very, very distracting.
The touchscreen UI when driving is also a very bad design. Touchscreens have no tactile feedback, so require focused visual attention to operate, taking not only the mental focus away from the road environment, but also moving the eyes well away from the road so losing much of the peripheral vision that can 'save' the driver by noticing unexpected motion.
Even as a racer with training on shifting attention between road, traffic, mirrors, surround, & instruments, I've found that any attempt to put a complex phone UI in a car significantly degrades my driving performance. Don't take me wrong, I love having the Android Auto maps up on the screen of my new CX-5.
But, the usability, even using the knob, is a constant distraction, and I far too often find myself squandering far too many microseconds on the UI trying to adjust the map, when I should have switched focus back to the road. It is a genuine hazard, and I've got training to manage it, and still often fail.
The primary, and almost singular goal of any driving or piloting UI must be to reduce the driver's workload. ANY few microseconds squandered on hesitation about the desired operation of the UI or just figuring out it's current state can become deadly.
This is an entirely different goal and threat structure from any ordinary computer or mobile device UI/UX design. Anyone doing it must be fully retrained and reoriented towards these goals, and pursue them relentlessly.
Except for GPS destination input (except if they provide a nice mechanical keyboard ;)) and map zooming. Imho they should allow touchscreen for GPS input and map zooming, and disable the touch for the driver when driving (except when it knows a passenger is sitting next to it and sees the passenger is touching it, should be possible to detect)
Plus it's pretty useless. Other that Bluetooth pairing it serves no real purpose. 99% of the time we control the music player and volume from the remote on the wheel. That's it.
1. It has terrible bluetooth lag. I like to sit in my car at lunch and eat and watch YouTube, Netflix, etc. but I have to disconnect bluetooth because the 2-4 second lag is unbearable. I don't have this problem with my other cars.
2. The keyfob drives me insane. If I get out of the car and leave it running, keyfob in hand, I can't unlock the back doors. I have to open the driver door and do it manually. I also can't lock the car while it's running with the keyfob. I guess Mazda would rather my children have heatstroke while I go in and grab something from the store. I have the keyfob in my hand! And the car knows it.
3. The touchscreen and overall UI is slowwwww. Strangely, the rearview camera boots up and displays superfast, which is the only nice thing I can say about the car's technical features. Switching from radio to bluetooth is an annoyingly long process. The main bootup is excruciatingly long as well. If I'm 5 minutes from home I just don't bother with any sound and mute everything because I'm already on my way and driving by the time it's able to do anything.
4. They charge you to add on Android Auto. Even if I did get this option, you have to get to it thru their already-mentioned slow system, so I don't even know if I'd use it. And you have to plug in the phone. Faster and easier to just put the phone on the magnetic holder and go.
I could go on but this is long enough already. I really like the car otherwise, but I'll be checking my next purchase very carefully when it comes to the technical side.
On-screen selections will involve tactile controls and I find that diable.
Why? CarPlay is a reasonably good UI unlike virtually anything pretty much any car manufacturer can create, Maps, Podcasts/music interface, etc.
Edit: May have found my own answers. ADA guidlines only apply to buses and other vehicles of that type: https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/transp... And most likely, not the operators.
Perhaps people with limited vision shouldn't be driving.
I've never found that to be true.
My VW has an amazing UI where the centre console is a small touch screen but it has a bunch of tactile buttons around the edge that also interact with the console. So the only time you need to use the actual console as a touch screen is when entering precise details like an address into the sat nav or phone number to ring. Which, in both scenarios, I am more than happy to do at the start of the journey or pull over to do. Everything else, from the radio to the air con, is controlled via tactile buttons.
More over, any important announcements that come up on the centre console can also be displayed on the dashboard as well. Including sat nav. So it means I don’t even need to look at the centre console to glance at stuff if I don’t want want to.
VW have gotten a lot of bad press in recent years but when it comes to in car UIs, I’ve driven few vehicles that compare equally well.
I'm sure I'm missing something here (or I'm a weird driver), or is it just that without having a multi-function steering wheel touchscreens are more of a hazard than a radio with buttons?
(Ok, reading a few more comments here, it seems that some cars use the touchscreen to also control temperature and other things that are still buttons and dials in our car (the touchscreen is pretty much only media, navigation, phone, and a few other functions I'm forgetting now because I never used them).)
Edit: the car doesn't squawk loudly at me when I hit the lock button when I get home at night, either.
On that note I also want to mention that Maps on Apple carplay has a terrible UI which could potentially be dangerous. To move around the map, one has to use arrow buttons on the touch screen. We can't move the map by just dragging on the map like on a cellphone.
I believe this is an effort to avoid driver distraction. But people, including me, keep trying to move it anyway while driving since its so instinctive, and when the map fails to move it adds additional distraction by having the driver investigate.
One of the primary advantages is that I can usually find the key I want without looking down at the labels.
In a car, I want tactile clickiness in mechanical or electromechanical controls. I even want rocker or throw switches, instead of buttons that light up an LED to indicate their state. And that means if the state changes in software, a solenoid or motor is going to have to flip the physical state too.
Touchscreens, despite having "touch" in the name, are strictly inferior for finger-based inputs. They're more "screen" than "touch".
I have a Mazda and hate their scroll wheel interface, with a touchscreen I can just press the "AM Radio" icon, with a scroll wheel, I need to turn the wheel then keep looking at the screen to see where the cursor is so I can click the right icon so it takes more attention -- both cognitive processing (how many clicks do I need to turn to get down to the button I want), as well as visual (is it on the right one yet?)
Voice recognition is even worse, I often end up having a conversation with the car "Call George" "There is more than one George, which one do you want to call" "George Modaline" "Ok, Calling George Smith - mobile".
Oh wait... they actually didn't!
Mazda's decision is very good: Any UI where you need to detour your attention from driving to changing car status is missing the point of its existence.
I see that the data may not agree with my experience but I look to have touch in every car I buy in the future. From a driver looking to leverage technology, while we get automation working, let's make it easy for the driver to get to the car's features.
The only thing a screen is good for is a backup camera. In my ideal car the screen just turns off or hides away when I'm not in reverse. Everything else is a distraction when you should just be driving.
It's handy while parked, but I don't think I want to be fiddling much with a touch screen while driving.
On the other hand, I don't see why my passenger can't be operating it while I'm driving.
Still against volume and climate controls not being physical buttons or knobs because having to look at a screen while driving for more than half a second is bad news.
I agree from personal experience that these LCD screens in cars are distracting, and what’s worse, don’t get updates so that in just a few years UIs will feel sluggish and ugly (if not already the day it rolls out of dealership (I’m looking at you Ford)).
My car has buttons for all these operations and it's great. What is bad for is browsing the map when I'm parked; say I'm looking for a car park near my destination, by the time I've zoomed out with a scroll wheel, browsed around and zoomed back in a few times I could've done the same thing on my phone and set off.
I don't think that thinking is the problem, the problem is looking to locate.
When there's a button that says 'Radio' on it that never moves, you don't need to look _or_ think.
At many companies, the people doing that kind of research would be people who no one really listens to. They would do the research. Then PHB-type characters would enter the scene. And if research yields recommendations that would steer the company away from the safety of the herd (of automakers, in that case), then the research would be cancelled and the recommendations ignored.
The knobs are just as distracting as using a touch screen -- you have to look at the screen to see what is being selected, and you have to take a hand off the wheel to use the knob. In many cases it takes several knob movements and button presses to get to something I could have just reached out and touched. How is that any safer?
[0] https://matthaeuskrenn.com/new-car-ui ; and HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261003
Also, to reduce distraction I suggest using Siri with CarPlay. It works like a charm and you don't even need to look to the screen.
I think a touch screen would be OK if it didn't operate while the car was in Drive, so you can set preferences, etc, with a full keyboard. But you can also do this from a companion app or website, so there's really no need to have it at all.
And I'm really glad to see HUDs come to cars. I wonder why it took so long!
I only care about the speed and fuel level. And a big STOP when something is wrong.and style feedback on things Iwill have to change soon.
Then radio and possibly two buttons.
All of this automatically provided when it is me who "logs in".
But I get some weird philosophical view of some designer go though I am interested in the engine rate (I do not even know the name of this rpm big dial), the oil temperature and whatnot.
With Uber or Didi especially, you get picked up in cars that have these touchscreens. I've never seen a driver use them for anything other than radio operation. They use their phones for GPS navigation.
And in the nicer cars (BMWs, Mercs, etc) the touchscreens just destroy the aesthetics of the car's interior. Horrible looking.
Automatic headlights come close, but my hate for those is mostly from drivers that fail to turn them on when the sensors fail or aren't sensitive enough to come on. So many heavy downpours / fog in our area and I see plenty of new cars without their tail lights on and just low beam/running lights.
In a more conservative industry, interaction practices researched and adopted at the beginning of the discipline would be maintained for decades without questioning -cough programming cough-, and profound changes would require a thorough adjustment of the tools used by the industry and the mentality of the practitioners.
IMO this is a wrong move for mazda. Eventually if these cars become smart cars then you will not be interacting with controls as much. Touch an go.
Hopefully I can find something of this sort to replace the 7" screen in my GT86.
Driving should be an exercise in focus with the tools to help me do so, even in the proliferation of options (climate, entertainment, etc).
The 17-inch screen in the Model S is just absurd to me. I dont want it. I dont want screens.
Screen navigation should be banned in the car no matter what type of screen it is.
When driving or piloting, what's the last time you heard the display has several levels of menu/screen to move around. Just display everything, let the eyes choose where to look.
All interior controls were touchscreen and impossible to use while driving. Worthless gimmickry.
Definitely didn’t tempt me to get a newer model. I’ll keep my 2014 with its buttons and dials until auto-designers regain there senses again.
Nothing is easier, more intuitive, or less distracting, than scrolling on a proper multi-touch screen.
Of course, needing multi-touch to do scrolling is a pretty major failure, too.
But rather if you offer touch scrolling you’ll also want pinch to zoom.
“Spectacular failure to apply even the most basic common sense” is a pretty strong position. In my experience with actually using a fantastic touch interface for navigation, and having tried and hated using nav systems in expensive cars in the past, where I’ve had to resort to using my phone for nav, I am equally strongly of the position that proper multi-touch nav on a large screen (Tesla Model 3) is safer and easier than any kind of button based nav system.
Now, sure, I can see how a large touch screen might make a better interface for navigation only, as long as you are stopped and can use it without having to look at the road. But I know of an even better interface -- give me keyboard and mouse, and even with desktop Google Maps I'll get routes faster than with any touchscreen system out there.
But of course 1) mouse/keyboard in a car isn't very feasible, and 2) that touch screen, since it's already there, is being used for controlling other systems in the car, too. And that is a problem. Anything that may need a quick adjustment while you're driving (and in real world, of course, that includes things you shouldn't really be doing while driving...) should be doable with muscle memory and at most a quick glance. Touchscreen doesn't do that, so I think it clearly does fail the common sense test.
What we need is to put all the controls both within sign and within reach of the driver, that means in and around the steering wheel, just like it was done in sport cars where driver focus is essential.
My current citroen is mostly touch controlled, but I find it requires less attention to operate than the button/dial controls on my old nissan which were horrible.
But I think the real future is voice control.
I get that’s its bad if you’re constantly interacting with it while driving, but... are you?
Good luck with that in 20 years or so...
Maybe it's something specific to my country overall my parents' generation keeps their vehicles as long as possible.
https://www.autonews.com/article/20161122/RETAIL05/161129973...
The issue is that we have to solve high-speed touch screens that behave well in vehicles that sit outside.
I'm not saying that tactile controls in general should be banned, and I'm probably also saying that most car manufacturers _absolutely suck_ at software and will elegantly botch any attempt at integrating a touchscreen.
Maybe Tesla has gone overboard and should add (software-controlled) physical dials for the systems that are used all the time and are never expected to change much, such as A/C, seat heaters, trunk & frunk and so on. But that's a comparatively minor UX modification.
The million dollar question is whether proper self-driving is 5 or 15 years away -- if it's the former, auto companies really don't have as much time to adapt as they think. Some customers might like a touchscreen-less Mazda if they can tack a safe self-driving system onto it, but they will have a hard time competing with companies that understand software and have good integration of intuitive touchscreen interfaces. Once (if?) proper self-driving is here, software suddenly becomes critical, and it's hard to control a complex software system through physical knobs. People will also want better entertainment systems integrated in the car at that point, and a touchscreen makes such modifications simple.
Meaning low friction in getting your audio/calls out over the speaker system and syncing of navigation with your other devices. And having car notifaction and interior lighting, audio EQ preferences synced too.
Any screens left in the car might be there purely for diagnostic or entertainment (think inflight entertainment and hopefully better) purposes, that need only minimal direct interaction.
People are used to being able to do sophisticated things that go beyond the sort of controls you can operate by feel. You used to get by if you could adjusting the volume with a knob and pushing one of 5 preset radio stations, and maybe being able to operate most the heater/AC controls without looking. That's not good enough anymore.
Voice seems to be the only real option. Maybe by the time it they work out all the kinks the cars will all be driving themselves.
This is already the case with Mazda's touch-disabled-while-driving screens.
Not sure at all about the net effect on safety.
The manufacturer is trying to make driving safer by removing touch screens (which is great, IMO). If the user is sooo inconvenienced by this move, enough to reach for their cellphone while driving, then that's their own fault. Hopefully they don't crash into someone.
Meanwhile Tesla... innovative, but not very driver-centric.
Touch screens require you to look at them to use them. Physical knobs and buttons do not. You're supposed to look at the road, not at a touchscreen.
sidenote: I was initially in the "bring the keyboards on smartphones back" camp as well, but given how well it all worked out 10 years later, I foresee the same happening with touchscreens in cars.
The description of the torque "“Doing our research, when a driver would reach towards a touch-screen interface in any vehicle, they would unintentionally apply torque to the steering wheel, and the vehicle would drift out of its lane position,", doesn't make any sense. I doesn't matter whether you reach for a touchscreen, button, or bugle, it would produce the same effect.
A button can be reached with sense of touch alone. A touch screen must be looked (or at least glanced) at.
I do like the VW implementation. There’s still lots of buttons and steering wheel control, and the screen is small enough and UI actions defined enough that I don’t have to look at the screen much to interact.
Great call by Mazda. Maybe a newer car purchase will make sense again.
I would guess this is a technical failure wrapped in PR messaging.
My mazda had the touchscreen, but I hardly ever used it.
There’s absolutely no question that almost everyone fails badly at in-car touch screens. Perhaps it’s due to the myriad poor quality past implementations that many people seem to be in denial of their obvious and incredible benefits for many tasks.
And if there is somebody who does NOT fail at this, I'd like to meet them. They probably have a working perpetual motion engine, too.
I know on one of the Tesla models, you even need to use the touch screen to open your glove box which seems odd. Then with all the news stories of police shooting people on routine traffic stops, reach for the center to open your glove box for your insurance card, who knows maybe you are reaching for a gun in the center console. It's just out of the norm since most people glove boxes just open up with an actual handle. Even though their computer always knows if you had insurance or not even before being stopped, just another way for the city to make revenue if you forgot your paper. But maybe I'm listening to the media too much but it wouldn't surprise me if some innocent person was murdered just because they decided to drive something different and slightly more technical while making a slightly wider turn than a cop thought they should of made.
There's a video on YouTube of a guy being stopped in a Tesla because the officer thought the touch screen was a modification instead of being built as part of the car... but after a little back and forth and laughs then realizes it's part of the car and leaves without any further info as a good cop should. while some others might feel bad and still try to find something wrong instead of accepting they were wrong.
Maybe in a popular tech-filled San Francisco cops see Tesla's every day but in small towns in like the midwest, they are rare and fancy. Then some places there isn't an official place to even get serviced, but the same could be said about Lamborghinis. I forget who but I was watching some internet marketer guy from some small town in Maine talk about owning a Lamborghini. Apparently every time you stop somewhere even at a traffic light people want to talk to you and get pictures. Even said people would drive and take photos which made him nervous since that's unsafe but people would chase him to get pictures. A BMW i8 would make a interesting super car since already the large BMW network of service centers at dealerships, but if you are the only one in a small town probably will attract people attention too. So I guess you can feel like a celebrity for a bit.
Then in New Jersey, they have DMV checkpoints during the morning commute looking for missing emissions inspection stickers waving people into a empty parking lot, while the Tesla is 100% electric and exempt but doesn't mean a cop will detain you for 15 minutes giving you a hard time and make you late for work because no one told him. But the same can be said about no front plates, 19 states don't require them (and July 2020 that will be 20 states as Ohio passed a law getting rid of front plates as a effort to save money but delayed it by a year from being in effect so law enforcement can figure out how to deal with no front plates. I'm not sure why they can't just call up the highway patrol from Kentucky, Tennessee or Florida and ask them since they have years of experience with no front plates and already figured it out.) but there's stories of people on road trips being hassled. Someone went on a road trip from Florida to San Francisco and got a parking ticket for no front plate... Might of been a meter maid though instead of a cop though. Well at least it's winnable but so annoying people paid to enforce the law are so uninformed.
I tremble a little bit when I want to play something with my iphone, nervously moving through the screens.
I think a couple of knobs, a few buttons, and a very simple screen, hopefully HUD of some reasonable kind - or even info displayed behind the wheel would be suitable.
I always wonder how many accidents all that technology causes.
A car doesn’t fit any of these.