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Comment by jetrink | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand how this trend started in the first place. If you look at e.g. digital cameras, they all have touch screens these days, but they also still have buttons and dials everywhere. The one in front of me has eight physical buttons, seven dials and a power switch. The reason is obvious: when you're taking photos, you don't want to be looking down at a screen; you want to be focused on the task at hand and aware of what is happening around you. If camera designers know this, why don't automotive designers, where the task at hand is a matter of life and death?

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They make cars significantly cheaper to produce - both in terms of parts and construction time. Evey button you lose is a button you don't have source and install when building the car. There's less wiring, less replacement parts to stock. It's a win in all kinds of situations for the manufacturer.

It's no coincidence that the company with most manufacturing issues - Tesla - also went with completely touchscreen based cabin with pretty much no additional cost. This is further confirmed by the fact that they didn't offset the screen issue by installing a projected HUD display (which is these days available in most 20.000$ cars) - it's complicated to install.

The cost argument should also apply to the camera manufacturers and yet they have enough common sense to not make decisions that (to me) are user-hostile. Teslas are in a different boat - it seems that whatever they do, people will still line up to buy their stuff, at least for the time being.

For consumer cameras it definitely has happened. But for professional DSLRs you’re serving are market that absolutely puts function over form, and will happy pay a big premium for a devices that makes them more productive.

Much easier to justify the extra cost of switches when you know your customers will happily pay a premium for them.

I suspect you’re assuming too much about Tesla buyers. You are overlooking the possibility that the product is actually good.

It's all subjective, to me the touch screen on Model 3 is a deal breaker - I don't want to make this big a compromise for something this expensive. Other people have different utility functions, but from my perspective it seems that part of the reason to buy it is Tesla hype. It's a car, it moves me from point A to B, it gets stuck in the traffic exactly like everyone else's car, am I really getting ~$10k more worth out of it compared to other products?

A lot of people don’t understand the touch screen isn’t really needed while driving, except for glancing at the speed maybe.

And since you ask, you get that 10k or more back in gas savings. On top of that there are other benefits, some of them objective and monetary such as resale value ($), safety ($$$), environmental responsibility, longevity of the car ($$), fun, and speed. So, yes. You should test drive one and see what it feels like.

And that’s just comparing to gas cars. Comparing to competing electric cars would be a different list of benefits.

>it gets stuck in the traffic exactly like everyone else's car

Ohhhh no no it is waaaay different because I make the lights that you don’t. Yes sometimes get stuck in traffic but not nearly as much. I can observe speed limits and still be way ahead of you because of the acceleration speed (quickness). Acceleration ability also means being able to keep longer follow distance in traffic without losing chances to pass safely when they open up.

Problem of course is that the interior of a Tesla has the aesthetic sense of a consumer electronics manufacturer, not of a precision automobile. It looks like a big fuckin' iPad stuck to the dashboard, almost aftermarket. It's tacky, even if the interface on the screen is better than most.

Way prefer the Mazda / Honda direction of moving back to switchgear. It looks and functions better, it can be discretely repaired and replaced by a normal person, and so forth.

Tesla big goal is self driving and the huge screen being the only interface sort of makes sense, if they ever deliver the self driving part that is

What kills me is when "legacy" automakers have dashboards with 40 buttons on them, of which you use may 5 regularly. It's especially annoying when the functions I use every day are buried in nested menus, but the button for setting the clock, sending a text, or satellite radio is right there front and center.

There shouldn't be menus at all. Modal systems in general are hard to use while driving.

You need HyperCar: HyperCard for Cars!

Then you could delete the buttons you don't use, and make the ones you do use really big, with cool pictures, and funny sounds when you touched them.

HyperCard Adventures (hypercardadventures.com):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19237052

https://hypercardadventures.com/

It works better in a sales pitch. "If you want to text your broker to punch in a few trades, it's just one button away!".

Nobody bothers to write sales copy saying "You can actually change the cabin temperature and the radio volume on this car"

There is so much misinformation in your mind.

Those supposed manufacturing issues are outdated rumors from the early days of the production lines when they were getting off the ground.

>went with completely touchscreen based cabin

Absolutely false. There are plenty of buttons and other physical controls in easy reach on the steering wheel and in other convenient and sensible places. As well as optional (you don’t need them) voice controls. It’s not “completely” anything based.

It would look much cooler if the display was in the middle of the steering wheel, and round, like a big old classic computer display.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB78NXH77s4

If this reason is true then it has the very characteristic stink of reckless endangerment....

Touch screens are cheap and very easy to develop for. They also de-couple the software development from the device development.

It also allows updates and changes after the car is in production.

lower parts count as well. More commonality possibilities between vehicles are possible. the ability to add and remove features at different prive points without having to add/remove as many physical parts is huge. They price compete on bolts and screws...removing a button is a huge cost savings when multiplied by you

Munro and Associates is a company that does reverse engineering and costing work and it's wildly interesting to learn about: https://jalopnik.com/the-fascinating-company-that-tears-cars...

Ya, Volvo has gone to a unified interface for their whole lineup. The standard stuff can be controlled with a few knobs and buttons and all the minor differences between models and trim levels are controlled on screen. I'm sure it saves them a ton since the part count would be very low now.

They've done a pretty good job at it too, but it needs to be customizable to be great. If I ordered the surround camera option, I want that to be easy to access, not buried a few gestures deep. Chrysler nailed it, they let you rearrange the touch screen icons and have a bar along the bottom where you can put items that are always visible. They also have more buttons and dials.

I would think that would be where good context aware software would come into play.

Shouldn't it just automatically show the surround camera when I am in reverse or in some parking mode? I feel like that could be a setting or a soft button that appears when appropriate.

> Shouldn't it just automatically show the surround camera when I am in reverse or in some parking mode?

For the past couple years, US law requires that they default to the backup camera when in reverse (which is dumb, but that's another discussion). At least surround view is only one tap from there. Other manufacturers still do this better by showing both the backup camera AND the surround cameras at the same time and the Volvo screen is plenty large enough to handle this since other manufacturers with smaller screens do it well.

It should do it in parking mode, but it doesn't! The car even switches to a top view illustration of the car to show you the ultrasonic sensor readings when you're close to stuff (ie. when you're parking) but it doesn't turn the surround cameras on!

And customers apparently like them, when deciding what to buy.

I never buy this argument. I'm sure we could've focus grouped seat belts and no one would've liked the experience but thank god we have them now, for the better.

We did "sorta" focus group seat belts, and I was there to witness it.

Before laws mandated the use of seat belts, most people didn't use them. My mother bought a Volvo 122 in the 1960s, and people marvelled at the three-point harness.

But it's not like US manufacturers rushed to take advantage of Volvo making the patents freely available, and nor did Volvo take over the world by storm.

Some cars had alarms that nagged the driver if the seat belts weren't done up. I recall my uncle routed around this by looping the driver and "shotgun" belts -behind- the seats and fastening them.

Left to their own devices, large numbers of people prefer convenience and low price to safety. Only by regulation did the mass market adopt safer cars.

So I completely agree, no, people did not like wearing seat belts. They only did so when their option to forgo safety was removed.

p.s. I recall watching this PSA in Ontario. Everyone laughed about it, but soooooo many young men then went out and drove their muscle cars sans belt. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sri9j3PA5vE

Customers often don't have much choice. Most people don't make car buying decisions based on the head unit.

You can't use the market as an example of it, because the producers shifted in (almost) unison, and bundled it with other more valuable features.

The same thing happened with 3DTVs -- the manufacturers all decided this was the next big thing, and shifted all their production to it, and it turns out.. it wasn't. But we as consumers had a 5-year drought where you simply couldn't buy a new TV that wasn't 3D. The same is happening with SmartTVs today -- if I want a new TV that isn't bottom-of-the-barrel tier, my only option is Smart.

When I got leased a VW Jetta a few years back, you had the option of no-touchscreen.. but that was the lowest-featured car, so you have up 10 other things for it.

You can also find the same thing in MacBooks with the touchbar -- once it was out, your only real options were to buy it, or throw the baby out and buy nothing/windows.

You can't judge whether customers like them, because it's bundled to other far more valuable aspects.

The Macbook touchbar holds a likely never-to-be-surpassed record for "The World's Most Useless Touchscreen". I literally cannot imagine how this UI abortion got to market. To me, the touchbar was the canary that Apple's innovation days were done. Sometimes, it's really NOT a good thing to "think different"(ly)...

Apple replaced the function keys because they were increasingly disused (and to increase the BOM and consequently the margin in absolute dollars.) The Touch Bar gets used more often. The default modes aren’t to everyone’s taste, but they’re easy for inexperienced users (based on our user observation) and power users like the potential to customize (check out BetterTouchTool if you haven’t yet.)

It looks real nice on a render.

I'd like to see everything controllable through the touch screen, but then have plenty of physical buttons and knobs that can be programmed to map to elements on the touch screen.

That way, if there is a software update; and there is a new feature it can be mapped to a button by the user in the way that they want.

Unreasonable, IMHO, for a car meant for consumption by the masses. Few people actually care about that stuff in the real world

Then provide a reasonable set of defaults and then most folks don't have to worry about it :)

> physical buttons and knobs that can be programmed to map to elements on the touch screen

Agreed, this is the end game.

The original CTS (circa 2003) did this. It had four buttons and a rotary dial on the steering wheel that you could assign to the functions of your choosing. This was a groundbreaking usability enhancement at the time. They also had a dial on the ceiling for the sunroof where you just turn it to the position you want the sunroof to open to (ex. 50%) and then the sunroof would open that amount. It was brilliantly simple and elegant.

Unfortunately, Cadillac went in reverse for a number of years afterwards... dropping the customizable buttons, dropping the sunroof dial, making touchsensative (but not actually tactile) physical controls. Finally, this year they have gone back to real tactile controls!

BMW has been using assignable buttons for over a decade now. I loved having one button to go to my favorite radio station, another button to call my wife, another to set the nav system to navigate home. The buttons are also sensitive to resistive touch, so if you put your finger on the button without actually pushing it, it will tell you on the screen what that button has been assigned to. I think BMW does tactile controls better than any other car I've owned. Not that many BMW owners use them, but even the signal light wand is a delight for tactile senses.

There may be other automakers who do the assignable button thing too, would love to hear from anyone who knows of others.

I was a little disappointed in the controls in the new volvo I bought last year. They have a mix of touchscreen controls and a limited number of tactile buttons and knobs. They got really close to getting it right. They at least need to make the screen configurable so you can put your most used functions on the home screen.

Fiat-Chrysler got this right at least. Their UConnect system has a system bar along the bottom of the screen that is always visible and you can decide which buttons you want there (heated steering wheel control, surround cameras, etc). If I wanted to bring up the surround cameras on the Volvo as I'm pulling into a parking space, I'd have to swipe right, tap cameras, then switch the surround view, with slight UI delays in between each of these gestures -- not ideal when pulling into a parking space. BMW (and the new Corvette C8) have a dedicated tactile button for this, Chrysler lets you put that "button" on the home row of the touchscreen... both are much better solutions.

Hopefully the automakers are coming out of a learning phase right now and things are about to get much better as everyone has tried terrible touchscreens and learned why there needs to be more buttons.

Jaguar/Land Rover have been starting to do this. They have knobs where the knob label is a tiny screen and they change function based on the context of the menu you are in.

That seems like the kind of nerd wish that 99.99% of buyers would never use and would make it impossible to drive somebody elses car.

Its like people who insist on working with dvorak in a company but much worse.

I can only conclude from the situation you describe, as well as the fact that most cameras (as cameras, not phones) still lack GPS and sometimes Wi-Fi, that a great many industrial designers are trend-following, uncreative bores.

Most modern car interior controls are horrible (Tesla’s giant laggy touchscreen included).

Why do I need my camera to have GPS? In what situation would I be equipped with a camera and not my phone, which certainly has a GPS? This seems like the same instinct that makes OEMs put mobile modems in laptops, as if I would ever have my laptop but not my phone to which to tether it.

EXIF tagging.

Because you would want your photos to be geotagged.

Also, whenever you are starting a sentence such as "In what circumstance..." and making blanket assertions, it's better to take a step back and question if other people's circumstances are radically different from yours. That's what good product thinking is about.

GPS in the camera is handy for auto-tagging the location of the photos. Which is nice for when on trips.

Thanks. I am familiar with why you want location data in photos. I am not familiar with any justification for why this data cannot be acquired from my mobile.

If I'm using a standalone camera, I don't want to be fiddling with other devices just to get geotagging working.

It possibly could be done in real-time using Bluetooth but I doubt it would be reliable and remember that higher end cameras might be writing out images at maybe 6+ frames/second. Alternatively you can make a point of recording a track on your phone (which tends to be hard on the battery life) and then syncing them up later. But, as someone who has done this, it's a pain in the neck.

Geotagging on my X-T3 with the Camera remote Android app is very reliable to be honest. And you don't have to query the phone at the same rate as you're taking pictures, it's perfectly sane to assume the same location for 5-10 seconds during a burst.

Fair enough. Though I'm not sure I'm convinced that, today, you're not just better off putting a GPS receiver in the camera. GPS is a bit hard on battery life but with the bigger batteries in these cameras, I'm not sure that's much of an issue. (And of course you can turn it off.)

Depends. MILCs are generally pretty hard on battery and keeping a constant GPS lock would exacerbate their generally poor "active standby" (camera turned on with the viewfinder or LCD active) battery life. On the other hand, my smartphone, using both GPS and augmented network location services can instead very quickly acquire a lock when needed with minimal battery usage only when needed. And it also has a way larger battery, and the system is generally more optimized.

Not everyone carries a phone, let alone a smartphone.

Not everyone wants to.

Geotagging pictures is a very important use case for a professional photographer, and relying on the user to provide GPS through another device is not advisable.

Also phone location services may not work very well without a cell signal, and not everyone takes photos only within range of a cell tower.

> This seems like the same instinct that makes OEMs put mobile modems in laptops, as if I would ever have my laptop but not my phone to which to tether it.

A cellular radio in a laptop gets access to better antennas and a vastly larger battery than what's found in a smartphone.

The combination of the batteries in my phone and my laptop is clearly more capacious than the battery in the laptop alone.

> a great many industrial designers are trend-following, uncreative bores.

More likely that the executives above them who are watching what sells and what doesn't are.

Laggy? The Tesla Model 3 touchscreen is anything but.

I had many reservations about the touchscreen prior to ownership, however I don't really have any complaints now. You get used to it, Tesla's specifically is not laggy, and most critical stuff is on the steering wheel/stalk anyway.

Maybe this has been improved in the Model 3, but in older models: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/how-laggy-is-your-to...

> Tesla’s giant laggy touchscreen included

This is false, full stop.

It started with the iPhone and the software-ization of all buttons. Buttons were seen as the enemy, inflexible blackberry relics of the 1990s. Tesla took this trend and ran with it, and many other cars, like my 2008 Prius, had already begun with their incredibly crappy touch-screen. Mine broke years ago and the audio is ENTIRELY on the front-right speaker. It can not be changed ever because ONLY the touch screen can change sound balance and touch screen's broken. Welp, at least my co-pilot has ideal audio?

I think because cars, although primarily a form of transport, are often also a fashion accessory, or a statement of who you are (or aspire to be). And touchscreens are very fashionable[1].

Cameras aren't really like that. Nowadays if you've actually bought a camera as opposed to just using the one in your phone you're probably at least a little bit into photography, and in that context the function matters more than the form and style.

[1] I'll grant that cost, along with simplicity of reconfiguration via software, may also be factors.

I just got a new camera, and the touchscreen wonderfully compliments the three dials I have. They have several physical shortcut buttons to back out of menus and to get to quick actions more quickly.

Tactile feedback and quicker response time on certain actions is amazing, and just using the camera is a blast.

My 2014 mazda has some touch functions, but the main radio controls and the entire climate interface are all still knobs and buttons. The clock is separate from the entertainment screen. I love it!

In the 90s and 2000s, cars had too many buttons and knobs. And car reviewers started using that as a criterion to judge the dashboard. So less became better. OCD!

Yeah, that’s what I hate about taking pictures with their iPhone, the lack of a tactile button for taking the shot. It’s especially bad when you have to photograph without a view of the screen.

(So that you don’t guess, I mean when photographing the back of my head or the inside of a tight crawl space when my cat got inside.)

FYI the volume buttons work as shutter buttons when using the native camera app.

Oh nice, thanks!

Does the iPhone not allow double-tap of the power button to start the camera? Volume buttons should work as a shutter button to take a photo.

I don't think it does anymore. You have to activate the screen and slide left to get the camera. The volume buttons still work for the shutter though, which I use all the time.

Automotive designers are simply catering to their perceived marketplace in order to realize maximum profit extraction.

Most people who drive would prefer to be insulated from the activity as much as is legally possible. Fly-by-wire everything, touch interfaces, etc. This is how you achieve that objective. These "innovations" are obviously the antithesis of safe. But, we all know money is more important than safety, and most consumers are attracted exclusively to this kind of shiny bullshit.

I think there's too much selection bias for this analogy to be particularly strong.

Digital cameras are increasingly a niche product that exist mainly to cater to people who specifically want a the "SLR" user experience. If you just want to take decent enough photos, your smartphone's camera today is better than most prosumer DSLRs from like five years ago.

I don't think today's DSLRs have the form factor that they have because it's objectively more usable. It's just the form factor that their self-selected customers want. One piece of evidence in favor of that is that all DSLRs do have big LCD screens on the back and often require a lot of menu diving to access any functionality that didn't exist in cameras before the digital revolution.

There's still a physical dial for switching modes even though that's not something you actually change that often. Meanwhile you often have to dig into a menu or go through crappy buttons to do things like delete a photo.

I won't go so far as to describe it as fetishization, because I think that's unfairly critical. But I do think a camera UX designed from first principles purely for usability would not have the same physical controls as a typical DSLR.

> I don't think today's DSLRs have the form factor that they have because it's objectively more usable. It's just the form factor that their self-selected customers want. One piece of evidence in favor of that is that all DSLRs do have big LCD screens on the back and often require a lot of menu diving to access any functionality that didn't exist in cameras before the digital revolution.

So on my seven year old Nikon D3s I can use buttons to focus and change the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, WB, focusing mode and focus selection point all the while keeping my eye to the viewfinder. I would almost never look at the rear screen except to check the always-on histogram if the lighting radically changed. This means I can react instantly during a sequence of shots without even thinking about the menu system. It is not just 'what I want' but a massive amount of directly accessible usability and configurability. Going into the menu system would almost never be necessary during a typical shoot.

The D850 I recently upgraded to is pretty much the same. I use the live-view screen on the D850 when shooting video but use the viewfinder and buttons (as above) when shooting stills.

I'll just add that mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras mostly became serious tools once electronic viewfinders became good enough that they could reasonably replace optical viewfinders for the most part. (Still not as good but a reasonable compromise given the smaller and lighter bodies they make possible.) As the say the LCD back can provide useful feedback--and are occasionally useful for specific situations when shooting--but at least for handheld shooting they're not often used for framing the subject.

And, to the original point of the discussion, these cameras also have lots of physical buttons and dials which are nice to have when they're properly designed.

> So on my seven year old Nikon D3s I can use buttons to focus and change the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, WB, focusing mode and focus selection point all the while keeping my eye to the viewfinder.

Sure, and you could do that with an SLR from the 90s too, as I recall.

Camera manufacturers are very innovative when it comes to capabilities and new features, but incredibly conservative when it comes to user experience and form factor.

Totally agree but the broader point stands that buttons have some very useful affordances

But that's not the original point, though. jetrink's claim was:

> they also still have buttons and dials everywhere. ... The reason is obvious: when you're taking photos, you don't want to be looking down at a screen

I agree that physical affordances are very useful. But I don't think the cause of DSLRs having them is because current manufacturers believe buttons have superior usability. It's because SLRs have had those same controls since before touchscreens existed and today's self-selected DSLR camera audience specifically wants products with that "vintage" user experience.

My evidence is that today's cameras generally only have hardware controls for features that existed since before the digital revolution. Purely new capabilities (like file management) have not included corresponding new hardware controls. Likewise, hardware controls that are no longer that useful, like mode selectors, are still present.

To me, this implies that camera manufacturers are not just trying to provide a "hardware control" UX, they are specifically providing "the hardware control UX of 90s SLRs".

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