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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Umm, I guess you haven't see the FAA-approved Garmin G3X Touch:
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.
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.
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.