A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar
jenson.org
jenson.org
Not only does it hide commonly-used safety-relevant functions behind extra taps in sub-menus (as detailed), it was apparently done to free up space to offer a 'dock' of app buttons - three permanant and three 'recently used'. I struggled to choose three apps I needed enough to fill the permanant spaces - and certainly don't need quick access (when I'm driving!) to Netflix, or games, or whatever is popping up in 'recently used' today. I would like the driver profile menu to be quickly available, but alas that's been hidden too.
It's a total cluster-f*ck that makes no logical sense when considering the need of drivers, and I hope they listen and revert at least this aspect of the UI.
Sadly we see such things more and more. For example a 3 year old TV looses apps such as Netflix or Skype which where specifically advertised on the box.
There ought to be an option to 'stay' at any 'version' you want. Only permit bug fixes. You know, LTS....
Doing it with a car is a whole different level though. I’m pretty sure it’d still fall under the same laws but returning cars is very tricky even when you have a legal reason.
Tesla software updates have in general been good with some setbacks. So the model still seems definitely better than what the industry usually does. A rollback option would be nice as this update shows. It would also give them some extra data on what people actually think of the updates.
Tesla UI has always seemed pretty terrible to me though. Their use of space, and insistence that you need to see a photo realistic picture of the car you are driving that takes up a massive amount of real estate is crazy to me.
On the other hand, I find a lot of car companies struggle with UI once screens come into play.
It's a bit disturbing they're able to make such drastic level of changes without heads up.
Can you imagine, taking your Honda Accord in for an oil change, and you find out that dealer completely re-arranged your center console?
I wish more features tied to safety should be available via physical switches. Even Model 3 has a physical hazard light switch.
That's because a physical hazard light switch is required by law.
Compared this to Hyundai cars, who I don't think gets enough credit for their ergonomics.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2022-...
https://www.genesis.com/content/dam/genesis-p2/kr/assets/mod...
If it's actually on the ceiling, I either know it's there, or I'll be into pulsing my brakes manually before I bother to find it should I actually need it.
But model 3 takes the cake.
The trim of the dash in the picture, as much as luxurious it may be, reminded me of driving a desk, a walnut or ?mango wood desk... sitting in a comfy four-wheeled office chair. Also notable so many buttons on the driver side door, not sure for what purpose.
Mercedes did eventually fix the issue in the most recent model w223 https://car-images.bauersecure.com/pagefiles/96149/mercedes_...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIBMxGdbjfo
On every other car I've been in, any switches in that location I would naturally assume are for controlling the lights right next to it, but evidently no one in Tesla's design chain thought of that...
Which can make their results absolute garbage.
Like data driven can tell you a button is "not used often" it can't tell you that a button is "essential to be fast available in some safety critical situations". (Or for other examples, that a feature is not unused because people don't want it but because it's hidden or bad designed.)
But somehow I still meat people which believe that poorly data driven approaches will yield the best results, which as far as I can tell is complete unrealistic. (Which doesn't mean in any way you shouldn't also use data for decisions, just be aware that data just shows a part of an picture and can often be very misleading.)
Myself and quite few others who come by themselves to the gym more infrequently andwere using the machines (you need a spotter for the same exercises on the free weights). Now both groups paid the same for membership, but they essentially removed the ability for one group to train, needless to say I moved to a different gym. By blindly following the data they optised for worse customers (you want people to subscribe but not show up often).
There are other considerations. If it costs a lot more to have someone using the machines than to have someone using the free weights, you might be better off with just the free-weight crowd than you are also having the intermittent machine guys. You want customers that are profitable, which isn't the same thing as customers that only rarely show up.
If it's really what happened I'd see that as a pretty great move.
At same spaces, yes! Good quality barbells and weights, while expensive, keep for over 30 years. Bodybuilding and powerlifting doesn't take much space, so you don't need a large space, and the customer base is dedicated and can often tolerate their gyms being a bit out of the way. Machines, however, like to break and are incredibly expensive compared to barbells and weights.
When people want to join a gym they ask the fit guy which gym they recommend. It's a bit like techies recommending thinkpads or macbooks which gave those respective products massive boosts.
Pretty much the problem in a nutshell.
As a non-English computer user, I'm increasingly annoyed by Crowdin-style jumblations. Missed context is the common trope for both - whether the less-used feature do mean the feature is less important, or whether the "Play" on a button do mean "I instruct you _Play_ this media" or "I want to _Play_ this game" depends on the context(the language I mainly use do use separate words for the latter two).
That got me laughing. :) I would be _convinced_ it's a joke and my friends are behind this and want to give me a treat in already sucking Covid-times..
App/icon X may be the most COMMONLY used one.
But it doesn't necessarily make it the most IMPORTANT one, the one I need to reach in a hurry / most easily.
I don't know how to capture, via automated telemetry, "this occasional button I REALLY REALLY need"... so it's just hubris then.
I'm an outsider, I've only entered Tesla's as opposed to driven them, but the UX is such a massive deal-breaker for this old grouch, it's unbelievable. I wish it weren't so but c'est la vie.
I use them at least a few times a year, though far less than I used to when I was on the interstate a lot more. Any time traffic rapidly drops more than about 20mph, I light up my hazards to let following traffic know, "Yes, you see brake lights, no, they're not just people scrubbing a few miles an hour off - get on your brakes now!" Probably a habit I picked up from truckers, a lot of them do this for the very understandable reason that a big rig doesn't stop on a dime, and even if they will, you're likely to unstack your cargo in the process.
Super infrequently used compared to other buttons, but also not something I really have the time go sorting through menus for when I need it. And neither do I trust the car's automatic systems to turn them on for me.
Though, if I could dream, we'd use LED brake lights to encode braking intensity somehow. The car knows if I'm barely touching the pedal to cancel cruise control and light up the brakes, or if I've just mashed them to the ABS actuation point, but the brake lights don't encode any of this useful info. You couldn't rely on it for car behavior (trivial to spoof, and get rid of tailgaters), but it would be an additional useful input for driving - "Woah, hey, that car in front of you just nearly locked up their wheels, radar data agrees, slow down!"
I don't know the legality of them, but nobody ever complained on the motorcycles.
I suppose regulations do not allow it in the U.S. but at least here it can be programmed on/off via service terminals.
Random example from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJk-rJpgF1o&t=108s
Maybe the concern is that in heavy traffic a sea of flashing lights will overwhelm / distract people too much? Or cause seizures? I'm really not sure.
Most German cars will flash the brake lights when you push the brakes hard, and they will also automatically turn on hazard lights if you brake hard to a (near) full stop (assuming you were going some minimum speed of 50 or 70 km/h).
ABS stepping in is not a requirement as far as I could tell (had this a few times when erring on the side of caution when the light turned yellow). Not requiring ABS makes sense because even if you’re driving on proper roads and your recent German car has great tires and brakes and doesn’t need ABS to decelerate quickly, the truck behind you probably still needs a bit more time and early warning to avoid a collision.
So now I have to type “news.” before it will fill news.ycombinator.com, because it started showing me the wrong option and I kept inadvertently picking it because it used to give me the right one.
There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for it to realize “every time this happens he closes that website immediately and goes to a different one that we ranked #2 in the autocomplete search.” So until I retrain my muscle memory I’ll just keep on mistraining the autocomplete even further.
This is a disheartening yet frighteningly common problem with UI automation. It doesn't learn enough to actually be aware of the expected result, yet it can't be programmed to behave exactly as you want or need.
Automation in user interfaces should be exactly the opposite. It should try to learn your repeated actions so that you can perform them automatically, yet if the learning goes wrong, the user should be in control at all times and override the automatic deduced actions.
For the type of situation that you mentioned, it’s common to design counter metrics or context dependent metrics. Define the “really important” situation, see how often people can use the necessary button in that time. Define your goals based on that ratio and you are on the right track.
The thing is, interfaces are limited. I think there’s a reasonable discussion around how important different features are, especially when they are rarely used in general.
Again, I’m not too familiar with Tesla, and it sounds like they made choices different than you think they should. But it’s not the approach that is the problem - setting bad goals or bad strategies is at issue.
I suppose a way is to correlate use of the button with activity that may indicate an emergency situation. For example strong accelerations, quick movement, etc... Some touchscreen can also sense how strong the push is, and we have a tendency to push harder on important buttons.
This is stupid. It's a car and you need controls accessible in an instant, not hidden behind a login page and captcha.
Rarely used buttons may be hard to find and yet very important in specific situations. If car companies really want to use some form of AI in the UI, that's going to be bad in almost all cases, except if they use it to help you find that important but rarely used buttons in those rare situations where you need it.
Of course it should also still be immediately accessible in its normal spot.
There's a reason things like planes and industrial equipment don't have dynamic interfaces.
You're assuming Tesla's end goal is to make the car more usable, and not to maximize revenue.
Their goal is to be transportation smart TV. Sell apps, media, advertising, etc. That's why so much money is being poured into self-driving cars. Americans in particular spend a massive amount of time staring at pavement, and that represents a huge untapped market.
Self-driving cars aren't about the betterment of humanity; the deaths and injuries are certainly horrific in scale, but self-driving cars don't solve the primary problem: our heavy use of low occupancy vehicle trips is not sustainable environmentally, energy-wise, land-use wise (roads or parking), logistically, economically (6+ year car loans, crumbling infrastructure because we can't afford to keep it all in good repair, etc)
(If you think this sounds like an exaggeration, just look at how technology is currently being used for government control around the world, and consider how self driving cars will be different).
I'm a big Model 3 fan but I hate the new UI. At least let us use the new docking areas for every possible function.
Up till now the windshield wiper control was the biggest model 3 UX issue. When I took delivery of my model 3 it started raining and I almost had an accident trying to figure out how to get the wipers working. The auto-wiper function sucks big time. But now there's more fairly important functions that are really hard to get to, from annoying (driver profiles) to safety (defog).
This is really hard to understand and concerning.
Touchscreens for any functions related to operating the vehicle should be regulated out of existence IMO. It’s a car not a phone.
The optimisation function should be how much you can do without needing to look away from the road.
If ever there was a case of “you break it, you bought it”.
He might have intuition in this area, but one individual's intuition is a poor substitute for actual data.
If there is one thing that I hear way too much out of intelligent, moneyed minds, is that people need to be controlled.
This is also how we ended up with the ribbon interface in Microsoft Office 2007 and beyond, then later other places within Windows (Explorer, Paint, etc). Microsoft essentially collected click statistics across various UIs and used those for decision making to choose which buttons would be big and which would be buried under small icons or sub-menus.
I'm used to it now, but it was jarring and took a while.
That being said, the new interface is terrible. So many things now take 3 taps as opposed to one.
I wonder if Tesla made the mistake of using A/B testing instead of vision-driven design like Apple. (Side note, just finished reading "Creative Selection" by Ken Kocienda of Apple, an interesting read on Apple's approach to design and why it is so successful as opposed to Google's).
In a car you want muscle memory, not "good for the brain"
I would also be irate if my coffee maker or microwave rearranged it's buttons. Any argument that it's "good for you" is inherently hostile.
What a waste of brainpower and education.
What I took away from it is that the design decisions at Apple are in the hands of a few. The chain of command is small, it takes countless iterations until it "feels" right and you obviously can't consult with too many people when it's a secret project. A/B testing is out of the question.
There's a setting for this in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard. My recollection is that this was previously a checkbox that toggled the "double-Fn to invoke Siri" function on and off, but as of Big Sur (at least) this is now a popup menu control, where the choices are "Change Input Source", "Show Emoji & Symbols", "Start Dictation (Press Fn Twice)", and "Do Nothing".
My test M1 machine was set up from scratch last year (i.e. no account migration) and has "Do Nothing" selected here, so I can't confirm that "Change Input Source" is the default for new users, but its position as the first item on the menu is suggestive.
Apple gets a lot of pass on a lot of stuff, but their UI is pretty terrible.
What they're really good at is overall device integration.
Bad news: worst-case scenario with bad car UX also prevents Alzheimers.
But +1 in part for suggesting an interesting-sounding book.
To make it clear: with bad car UX you may not live enough to get Alzheimers.
Lots of hate on this TMC thread on v11 [1]
[1] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/v11-software-update-...
From all the other stories on TMC, TeslaLounge etc., I think the more notable detail is that you got a loaner at all.
Stories abound of "Sorry. No loaner. You get Uber credits." "Uhh, there's not really any Uber near me." "Sucks to be you, I guess."
Nothing on earth would convince me there is any necessity whatsoever to having a screen in your car, much less a touchscreen. But then again I'm also against power steering, ABS, and generally any and all electronics that obstruct feeling from the steering column. Don't even get me started on automatics. Cars for me ended in the 80's, everything after that has been gravy. I see Tesla as nothing but gravy.
I'd be curious to hear why/how you defend it? I cannot think of a single benefit.
For example, this may not be common, but I find I can glance at the speed/car status section of the screen more quickly than I can glance down at a set of dials in the traditional position, and weirdly the sidways/down glance seems to retain more peripheral vision of the windscreen/road than the downwards glance to the traditional location.
>(current UI update aside)
One thing at least I'll never have to deal with is finding a brand new re-arranged center console in my Geo Metro the next morning!
>but I find I can glance at the speed/car status section of the screen more quickly than I can glance down at a set of dials in the traditional position, and weirdly the sidways/down glance seems to retain more peripheral vision of the windscreen/road than the downwards glance to the traditional location.
I think you just got used to it. Tesla adding a touch screen has not magically superseded the tens of millions of hours car designers put into interiors.
Search 'Akai midimix' to get an idea if what I am thinking at.
Even better, the buttons could have e-paper labels to show what function they perform.
As in: "I made all my money back in the first week, everything since has been gravy."
However, I hear the point of the parent comment that the writing prefers an aesthetic/tactile experience of driving cars in the traditional way with minimal assistive technology (though I personally think that modern vehicles typically give you more control over your car).
[0] https://mycardoeswhat.org/safety-features/anti-lock-braking-...
I notice the kids don’t see hazards (pedestrians) as well on the car with a backup camera as they do in the car that requires you to physically turn around.
The original backup camera was on the Prius because it had a huge blind spot, this fix should have been to th blind spot, not the degraded function of a fisheye lense and a driver facing forward.
I think the physical action of tuning is a somatic trigger that the steering is different and to swivel the head around for hazards.
Regarding the other examples of driving aids, yes, those are abstractions with some drawbacks, and a top-of-the-curve driver could do a better job without it. But still they could be a net positive because of the benefit they bring to not-that-good drivers.
Screens though, those I agree 100% shouldn't be on a car.
I think drivers education is severely lacking in North America. If it wasn't we wouldn't need to rely so heavily on building $100k armored tank vehicles with .01nm of force behind the wheel that nobody has a chance in hell of repairing themselves. There's no reason Granny shouldn't also be able to catch a slide.
A human is incapable of performing as well as a modern ABS system which can independently operate each wheel and can adjust hundreds of times per second. Same with traction and other stability assists. Most of these things tend to be unused at highest levels of motorports not because the drivers don't need them but because they're banned so as to make the spectacle more exciting.
Even if you fancy yourself a Colin McRae, leave your electronic assists enabled while driving on public roads.
There's also a corner case - winter driving conditions - where manual steering might give you lots of critical feedback.
(that said, I wouldn't purposefully get a manual steering car anymore)
Powersteering has allowed cars to have much more available grip and it is not a inherently a bad thing although it comes with its downsides too. Mainly fuel efficiency and overconfidence issue.
It's a CAR, ffs! Tesla, please stop acting like it's a cell phone
What's next, Microsoft Excel?
I knew Tesla UX was, um, interesting, but this takes it to a whole another level.
Has the regulation changed? Is it now legal for a car to play Netflix while you are driving?
Now imagine this happening to your car. I would sell the car as soon as possible. Cars, like ipods, are tools that should not require extra attention at random moments.
[a]: Genuinely asking. I don’t own a Tesla
You're not forced to. The car will alert you when there's new software available and even download it when you're connected to wifi (which I never am because I live in an apt and park far from my actual apt), but you still need to decide when to schedule the install, because it can take 30-90 minutes to complete. The UX has not yet degraded to the point where Tesla decides 'eh, you don't need your car at 3am to go to the airport/hospital today.'
I do believe there are cases with critical bugs where Tesla can force the update.
I have the v11 update sitting on my car and I'm not installing it until I hear some of this stuff is fixed.
I have it sitting on that screen, nagging me, and, honestly, it's depressing.
Granted Tesla is pretty naggy about the updates should you choose to hold off. But as far as I know, it's not limiting any functionality should you choose to do that.
For example the Polar watch app simply says you need to update the app firmware to keep using the app: that's not opt-in.
Telsa will eventually push an update through to your car over cellular. (or during service, when your car will automatically connect to the tesla service center wifi)
What mechanisms are at play that allow professional UX design teams to fuck up a car display?
like literally i dont want to think when i need to defrost my window going 70mph and yet here we are
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by the need to sustain the visibility of own necessity.
90% of PR and Web/UI/UX people could be safely fired after a couple of interactions of the design (and brought back 3-5-7 years later when the new or re-design would be needed). Sitting and not doing anything would make them fired, so they invent "new", "innovative" and other bullshit named things to justify their pay.
Eg: my bank, which changed the logon page like 10 times in 3 years. All times with a lavish descriptions of how the experience got even more better. The page consists of a login and password boxes, just like it had 10 years ago.
Isn't this most positions and just people in general, in some capacity?
Business and sales pushing for new features that no one necessarily needs.
Back end devs padding their CVs with hot tech and often doing refactoring for the sake of refactoring.
Front end devs adding more bloat for marginal visual gains and messing with the UI/UX.
DBAs mucking about with indices which will either improve or worsen things when the DB is performing adequately already.
Ops pushing for using new industry practices which will probably introduce undue complexity into the mix.
QA being overly nitpicky about bugs or even visual flaws that no one will ever even run into or notice.
Security complaining about supposed CVEs that automated scanning picked up, but that cannot realistically be exploited.
It is.
Thing is, technical positions (compared to 'artistic') have the means to show the proof of work, though sometimes it requires 'translation' to manglement-speak and they are not immune from 'I can't see|touch you work - means you are not needed'.
Creative positions... they literally show the [finished] product, and in our sphere it is usually seen immediately - you can't imitate redesigning the home page of yoursuperbank.com, or spend months on it.
But while DBAing, administrating or securing is a never ending process, re/designing is a process with a clearly (well, usually) defined finishing line. So if you want the paycheck - you need to sell the dire need to tweak fonts every couple of months.
> So if you want the paycheck - you need to sell the dire need to tweak fonts every couple of months.
You could say the same about addressing technical debt. Or introducing containers. Or a service mesh, or another form of service discovery, load balancing, circuit breaking. Or refactoring your old code. Or adding more tests, or more kinds of tests (e.g. chaos engineering, or even browser automation tests). Or clustering your database, or maybe sharding it. Or rewriting your software in Rust, for stretching this argument a bit further.
Many products out there could be considered "finished" in their current form, maybe only apart from security updates which need to be constant (to address things like Log4shell), or maybe scaling them (though that shouldn't always require constant rewrites, short of a very optimistic growth scenario).
For example, if Skype's development stopped 5 years ago (or before whenever the last redesign happened and new features were added) and it remained "stable", the world wouldn't be any worse of a place or even the product worse off than it is now, at least in my eyes. Of course, many say that it's largely dead and has been displaced by the likes of Zoom or Teams which is perfectly fine albeit probably not very relevant to the discussion - it's not like their updates seemed to help them much in this regard.
You are reducing this whole academic field that produces UX designers with the like of UI/visual/graphic designers who never studied or learned how to evaluate designs and study how people use designs (usability testing), which would TRIVIALLY catch and solve the issue in the OP of a severe usability issue with the V11 Tesla UI redesign.
A lot of time design is outsourced to low grade ux designers in other countries who start with design and never test anything in my experience, Accenture, TCS, etc. that churn out these usability design disasters.
If the team is in house, then they aren’t running a legit UX research practice, just focused on aesthetics, minimalism, and cool factor of Tesla in-house and I will bet you money their resume is visual/UI design heavy and HCI is not even mentioned.
UX =\ UI, and you have proven that this misconception still exists and we need to try harder as an industry to call out the dilettante UX teams who are really UI designers faking it to command a higher salary without doing the real hard work to understand user behavior and test designs for usability issues, etc.
> You are reducing this whole academic field that produces UX designers with the like of UI/visual/graphic designers who never studied or learned how to evaluate designs and study how people use designs (usability testing), which would TRIVIALLY catch and solve the issue in the OP of a severe usability issue with the V11 Tesla UI redesign.
Apart from bringing shortcomings in our educational systems to light (e.g. the pace at which the industry moves ahead and the inability of many academic programs to keep up with it), i'm not sure i can agree with the entirety of the argument, because it almost reads like the "No true Scotsman" argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
Should more academic knowledge be applied to the industry? Sure! But since that's clearly not happening, it's useful to explore why that is: in my experience, much of the academic research and ideas (model driven development in particular or many approaches to testing software come to mind) never find their way to being applied in the industry, don't get turned into viable products or even practices. Thus, i'd say that it's not like this academic field is maliciously being reduced in that argument - it has simply failed to make itself relevant as a whole, one that would be worthy of consideration (even if it should). That's how we get these UX messes.
Sure, one can talk about outsourcing and how these consulting companies are responsible for the end results, but the blame also lies in the businesses who don't want usable software in 5 years but good enough software in 1 year. Can you really blame them for trying to remain competitive and cutting out all of the non-essential factors just to be the first to market and be able to iterate quickly? I think i can, so perhaps it's useful not to blame some underpaid person who's under the pressure of made up deadlines, but rather the company that wanted to go down this path (both the client and supplier), as well as the whole economic system as a whole. In my eyes it's not that dissimilar to how everyone wants to hire experienced devs, yet no one wants to invest in new devs.
The tone in your comment rubs me the wrong way, maybe because it seems like gatekeeping or elitism. Clearly if the industry was better aligned with sustainability and a friendly approach to HCI, these good patterns would emerge naturally: if a compiler can point out problems with code or plugins do the same with code style, or even Lighthouse tell you about potential improvements to the page structure, why don't we have the same for accessibility and everything else?
Just look at Flutter, something that was touted as a great advancement in interface design, yet breaks not only screen readers (at least up to recently), but also cripples basic browser functionality like right clicking: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/
Look at "The Website Obesity Crisis", a trend that plagues the entirety of the industry and seems to be like the front end equivalent of the Wirth's law: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm (which also coins the term "Chickenshit Minimalism", as funny as it is)
I don't think the solution here is to point fingers at one another and to claim that person X isn't a true developer because they didn't ignore the economical climate that they are in to pursue creating the perfect UX, or that person Y doesn't fit the criteria either because they didn't rewrite their codebase in Rust with 100% code coverage, or even that they didn't attend an academical institution for an arbitrary amount of years.
As someone with a Master's Degree in CS with the added qualification of a Programming Engineer, i feel like a lot of the things that i learnt were due to my own initiative and caring about it all, rather than some formalized study course. And even so, i sometimes find myself making tradeoffs or sub-optimal choices (albeit well described ones and clearly logged as technical debt) because i enjoy having food on the table, so to speak.
I think we should start with the realization that many industry trends are actively harmful, that you can only work against them in a limited capacity and have to make the best of it: http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
Disclaimer: not downvoting your comment, because while i disagree with a part of your argument, i think it's worthy of discussion.
The elitism you sensed was just me struggling to articulate my frustration of going through the rigorous academic route, yet in this industry there is a plague of graphic/10-week UX bootcamp designers who are polishing portfolios and getting hired above junior levels and thus dragging down the field of UX design when they make deleterious design decisions in a user interface and are either uninterested in or too inexperienced to run proper usability testing or UX research methods to evaluate unintended/harmful designs.
“The market seems to want generalists, because they seem cost effective, and because most operations are too small to support a team of specialists,” says Steve Krug, a veteran usability specialist and author of the influential book Don’t Make Me Think. “But I think it’s pretty hard to be really good at more than one of the many subspecialties. It’s a conundrum.”
The skillset to understanding user mental models and behavior is a key component of being a great UX designer and allows you to illuminate where harms exist in design and that can be mitigated when design matches user mental models on a user population representative level. Having this skillset and design practice would have easily caught the issue presented in the OP regarding confusing button schemes in the Tesla V11 UI update.
The fact that it was pushed out to Tesla drivers without nuanced user testing by UX professionals (UX researchers if we break it down into specialization), says a lot about the design team at Tesla, or lack thereof. All this has nothing to do with the developers who are simply taking these designs and implementing them, who are typically overworked and focused on delivering features driven by success of measured KPIs.
You know, i can fully understand why someone would be frustrated with these things! Yet, at the same time, getting a degree didn't prepare me for the realities of working in the industry either - that took further years of work. Perhaps it's a bit like someone expecting to learn C++ in 2 months whereas in reality getting to really know it might take anywhere from 2 years to 2 decades (depending on what you actually want to do, be it write your own compiler, write a physics/game engine, or some low level piece of software that should be bulletproof, vs just a package or two for your own needs).
The first step at getting good at something is to be bad at it - personally, i really appreciated being able to work with microservices in an academical setting and learning about the many ways it can go wrong, but even now, in my day job i am still learning a lot, albeit it takes a lot of care to limit the fallout of mistakes. In this industry, new technologies and methods just never seem to run out, so it's a constant process of learning and churn, sometimes without good reason.
I do agree that figuring out someone's seniority and what they should be entrusted with is difficult and oftentimes nebulous, but perhaps that's just because of the rapid pace of this industry and how much of a "Wild West" it is at the moment.
> “The market seems to want generalists, because they seem cost effective, and because most operations are too small to support a team of specialists,” says Steve Krug, a veteran usability specialist and author of the influential book Don’t Make Me Think. “But I think it’s pretty hard to be really good at more than one of the many subspecialties. It’s a conundrum.”
With this, i might have to concede. I still think that having inter-disciplinary engineers who are competent at everything even if not brilliant at any one particular thing is probably a good idea, but there can definitely be a good argument to make about having specialists. Yet, the financial realities of our world will often force our hand in one particular direction or another.
> The fact that it was pushed out to Tesla drivers without nuanced user testing by UX professionals (UX researchers if we break it down into specialization), says a lot about the design team at Tesla, or lack thereof. All this has nothing to do with the developers who are simply taking these designs and implementing them, who are typically overworked and focused on delivering features driven by success of measured KPIs.
Partially agreed! There are usually "known unknowns" (e.g. "we don't know how this piece of code will interact with that other piece, we should probably set up automated tests to catch them diverging over time") and "unknown unknowns" (e.g. "we probably should have been aware of the UX impact of these changes, which totally escaped our consideration"). Maybe people knew about the UX impact, but didn't want to speak up or be contrarian in that particular environment. Maybe they knew, but just didn't care much, since no one would go to jail for shipping bad UX (at least in the automotive industry in the current year, it would be a different situation in aerospace industry). Or maybe no one even considered it for a variety of factors.
I guess we'll never know, but i agree that it's probably telling of what the priorities were, perhaps being a reflection of the greater trends in our industry. I am yet to see the likes of ADA (https://www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap5toolkit.htm) compliance ever be mentioned as a concern in any of the commercial projects that i've worked on, lest it be explicitly demanded in the design spec. But talking about which front end framework or component library to use? Endless bike shedding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
1. https://www.acm.org/special-interest-groups/alphabetical-lis...
The whole point is moot here.
Tesla, with enough money to hire the whole alphabet soup, DIDN'T made it right.
The only times I was able to ship proven correct and virtuous designs was a) sneak stuff thru when no one was watching and b) being product manager imbued me with the juice to get what I wanted.
Every other time, good design was sabotaged by yahoos and chuckleheads, unburdened by experience or domain knowledge, yet were somehow gifted with the certainty of "what users really want".
Products evolving more gradually doesn't entirely solve the issue you're concerned by, but users don't have to take on the full brunt of massive product changes all at once.
If the UI update is bad and the car is now worth less, you've damaged my property.
Edit: apparently the updates are opt-in so it's not quite as bad, but still.
Who needs Netflix or games on the center console of their daily driver? But yea, I supposes Tesla is betting hard on FSD making attention unnecessary and preemptively deals with driver boredom. Except FSD is no where near trustworthy especially with consideration to other drivers or - Go forbid - if you have family onboard.
Just put an 12" iPad Pro into the passenger compartment it doesn't matter at Tesla pricing range anyway, at least you get one high quality machine with your purchase then.
B2B? Not so much, if you care about those 6+ figure renewals afterwards.
My Samsung S21 just updated to Android 12 yesterday, and with it a new One UI is on my phone. There's no striking difference here, but the size of items in the curtain have been made smaller, and the brightness slider is different. I have no clue why those things changed. The curtain seem to change every two generations at most, usually just changing spacing and size of the items. It's annoying at best, and the only positive thing is that feeling of "something new", which wanes fast.
Why would companies spend budget on this kind of pseudo improvement is beyond me.
I agree with everything you said apart from the "Spotify is great" part.
Maybe Tesla's UI team thinks they design the UI for self driving car
/end rant
This annoys me because our Model 3 can never decide who is getting in for a drive. Without fail it trys to adjust the seat to accommodate my 5 foot partner when my 6 foot frame is in the seat.
The removal of the profile icon makes undoing this even more of a chore.
So it's a Tesla.
Tesla are trying to recreate that new car smell and feeling by refreshing the digital dash board and software features. And deploying an old Microsoft trick of rearanging buttons to produce a new experience out of nothing. Instead of fighting the falling attention spans, Tesla hopes to remove the need for them altogether. So you can continue tapping and scrolling while driving.
[0] Warning: even Carrot Top may offend some viewers today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byhzsQ0AzYI
Slightly off-topic, but out of curiosity: what is your typical defense here? I've seen a lot of people complain about it (and their arguments make sense to me), but I haven't seen anyone defending it. Yet.
Even after reading that, I had to look at the pictures again, and read the paragraph again to find where you are supposed to tap. When they simplified the UI, they also removed the degrees symbol and the fan.
Seeing as how 60-70 are both reasonable temperatures in Fahrenheit and speeds in miles per hour, it is not at all clear at a glance what that number means.
(Disclosure, I work for GM)
I don’t think I would have EVER tapped on the temperature without reading about it somewhere.
It doesn’t look tappable, as the article says. It’s not a common thing to tap on in other systems I’m aware of.
I think the writer’s guess of the car icon is excellent. That probably would have been my first guess too.
(I’ve also never used a Tesla)
I had foggy windows and had to watch a youtube video to figure it out before I could drive the car.
This, I believe, is the real point of failure. The value of reorganizing the icons into sub-menus can be debated, but some of the details that were removed in the course of this change appear to have been critical.
There is a concept in UX design called "information scent" – the combination of spatial, contextual, and cultural cues that clue a user in to where they can find what they're looking for. Simply keeping the fan icon next to the temperature display/button might have been enough to make the mental connection for the OP (and likely countless others).
Of course, this is the kind of thing that tends to shake out in user testing, and I'm very surprised that this appears not to have shown up in the testing I would assume Tesla must do with any change to the dashboard, certainly one this fundamental.
I would have no trouble adapting one I knew, but I doubt that I would find it for myself. And relying upon users discovering where functions are located by randomly pressing buttons is a bad UX/interface for a vehicle IMO.
EDIT: Or how about this one as in my 2000 model S4: http://www.2040-parts.com/_content/items/images/50/340150/00...
It's literally a function of the climate control system, and is almost always part of the same set of buttons as temp/fans etc in a car with hard buttons.
When you push the demist button, air is directed to the windscreen, by the same system that directs air to your face or feet.
The use of climate control to de-mist a windscreen is pure implementation detail, and I don’t think the Model 3 even uses climate control for de-misting, instead relying on resistive heaters embedded in the windscreen.
Personally I associate climate control and the temperature setting with personal comfort. But de-misting is a core driving control, and sits along side wipers, lights, fog lights etc. I use all those to drive safely, and expect them to be within easy reach of the driver and readily available. Climate I’m happy to have in a sub-menu, because I can always wait to adjust the temperature if I’m dealing with tricky road conditions, same doesn’t apply to de-fogging equipment (which may, or may not, involve the climate control).
I would not even consider the speed being on the center console so I’d have assumed it would be the temperature either way.
However in all the cars I’ve used that would either be completely inanimate (as affordance as it would be easy to hit when trying to increase or decrease the temperature), or it would lead to extended climate control configuration (e.g. vent speed, multi-zone temps, …).
I’d never think of looking for the defroster there though: while defrosting uses the same hardware as climate control (heating and vents), it’s not actually the same function.
https://cdn.carbuzz.com/gallery-images/original/270000/800/2...
The UX sucks, but if you did know where climate control features are hidden, why would you not assume the demister function is elsewhere?
UX is interesting because what is seemingly common sense to me (demister = climate control) is totally not to others.
When I saw it in the article, I actually initially assumed that it was the speed set for cruise control, as it lacked a degree symbol and had up/down symbols suggesting that it can be adjusted in increments. The up/down symbols suggests to me that it cannot be tapped to access other functionality, but that I should tap the arrow to adjust the number.
Maybe some brainiac at Tesla thought that you can just accelerate/brake to figure that out. :D
In my view, the actual cabin temp reading is not of such importance to be on the main view panel as such. Maybe just some +/- warm/cold controls. I'm not into measurements, just immediate comfort.
If needed, then, sure, detailed info/climate subscreen.
But defroster/defogger button must be visible, just for the sake of "least surprise" principle!
I think many of us have been incensed by UI changes in software we use for our daily work, and that's already bad enough; but IMHO this really crosses a line.
There were jokes when Apple changed the scroll direction, comparing it to the steering wheel of a car suddenly working opposite to what everyone is used to; I'm not sure if it's possible to do that with a Tesla or other modern car, but it's disturbing that we seem to be headed down that path. What an absurd reality.
The icons-only UI is also a huge regression; would it really take much extra effort to add a text label? I know people often mention localisation when it's brought up, but much of the world knows English, this is an American car sold in English-speaking regions, and changing the text in software is much easier than a separate part with different printing.
(I drive a 50-year-old land yacht that's received many upgrades, but all under my control; so my perspective may be slightly biased...)
I cannot agree more. A lot of safety in driving comes from muscle memory and doing without needing to look so that focus is on the road.
No wonder Tesla fans are fan of self driving and afraid of human driving, the effing Teslas seem like a usability nightmare.
This might be a "feature": make cars so confusing to manually drive that humans become worse at driving, so that Tesla doesn't need to improve its driving software.
I don't actually believe this, of course, but it seems we're headed in that trajectory.
paycheck, see my other comment [0] for an example
Well, just like a smartphone, sometimes the latest OS update makes changes that people don’t like. For good or ill, I think the Tesla way is probably the future for most cars and my not-so-smart vehicle UX will be increasingly rare.
How so? If they design something that doesn't fit the screen, etc. in another language - it's just a bad design. Localizations have been a standard process for decades already. They can be quite challenging when it comes to bidi, yet most left to right languages are no issue to even bring the topic.
Mandatory user feature flags would be a good solution for that. After installation if you don't opt-in for the new features you get the same behavior as before.
Why? Just don't buy a Tesla or other cars that do this.
You don't have to outlaw everything you don't like, you can just choose not to patronize the people who do this. Vote with your wallet!
For instance, I'd bet getting stick shift in a new car in 15 years would cost the price of a Ferrari. That's what it would mean to "vote with your wallet".
For the most part, competition works well. If there are enough people who care about this issue, it will be worth it for a manufacturer to not follow the trend, to get those extra consumers.
If almost everyone else prefers this way, well, yeah, you're out of luck. But unfortunately, the world doesn't owe you anything. If you're the only one who cares about this, that's just unfortunate.
> For instance, I'd bet getting stick shift in a new car in 15 years would cost the price of a Ferrari
General issues aside, I'm surprised you think this. Driving stick has been around for dozens of years despite the invention of automatic transition. And in many countries in Europe, it's actually much more common.
It works with a healthy support by regulators. I'd back that claim with the amount of cartel like behavior that gets disclosed every so often, and how hard the different nations are trying to come with solutions to the MS/Meta/Google/Amazon/Apple problems.
"Vote with your wallet" is the part that happens after the competition is alive and kicking, up to that point a lot needs to be done to have competition in the first place.
> driving stick
Auto transmission was seen as a luxury for a long time and a lot of EU country favor frugality. Now that hybrids and full EVs are seen as more eco-friendly the change will get a lot faster I think.
Stick shifts will probably stay the norm for many decades more in rural Aftica for instance, but otherwise I don't think it's long for the more developped world.
How does that help when a Tesla wrecks my car because they were looking for the defogging button instead of looking at the road?
What would help your concern out are safety standards. I have no idea what safety standards exist for car UIs, but I imagine some exist, and that updates have to comply with them.
Not an expert at all but seeing what Tesla achieved so far, I would guess that there is at least some sort of grey area. I always thought for example that wipers control lever would be a mandatory thing but heck, looks like it is not. The same for the SOS button in a clearly visible and accessible place: I have driven a Tesla M3 just once and I came out from there thinking it was not present at all (turns out it's on the roof, at the center).
Yeah, it'll be written in obscure legalese and say something like 'we will ship updates to improve the driving experience' not 'one day you might be unable to work out how to demist your windscreen while driving at motorway speeds'
> If not, consumers can always sue, I imagine.
You say that like it's a trivial endeavour! And how can one 'vote with their wallet' when they've already bought the car? A car is, for most people, a multi-year, extremely expensive investment; voting with your wallet is useful advice when your local coffee shop changes their recipe.
I'm not saying I like this behavior myself necessarily, but the bar for making something illegal should be quite a bit higher than "I personally don't like this". Engineers tend to always be against auto-updates, and yet consumers in general massively prefer this (and there are good cases for it).
Perhaps I missed another part of the discussion - automatic updates are not universally good or bad; the problem is they are not always deployed in a way that benefits the user. I disagree that consumers massively prefer it when the item they purchased suddenly changes, particularly the UI - people build muscle memory when they use an interface, and significant changes undermine that, wasting time and effort and, in the case of a car, increasing personal risk. Think about the consternation caused by the introduction of the ribbon bar in MS Office (not an auto-update per se, but as good as that for many people for whom upgrades were mandated).
Auto updates that add new features in a sympathetic way, or solve underlying performance or security problems without substantially changing the product, are obviously usually a good thing, but that's not what this Tesla update is about.
I mean, if that's what we're talking about, you're literally arguing against any change ever.
> Auto updates that add new features in a sympathetic way,
I'm not sure what you mean by sympathetic, but most updates are made because the company thinks it will make the product better, or increase the company's bottom line. Rarely are they deploying a change to actively make something worse.
I'm arguing against change for its own sake.
(edit: to be clear, the point about the Office ribbon was a counter to your claim that 'consumers in general massively prefer [auto updates]' when those updates make significant UI changes)
>...most updates are made because the company thinks it will make the product better, or increase the company's bottom line
...and you can't see how those two goals can be misaligned? Stuffing the HN front page with ads would increase YCombinator's bottom line but it certainly would not make HN better for the user.
Then I think the new ui is worse than the older one - but my wife prefers the new one.
US Tesla owners, if your Tesla is affected by this issue, and you believe that removing the one-tap defroster button is a safety risk to your driving, please report that ASAP: https://www.nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem
For those of you that file a complaint, please maintain your focus on the safety issues the update has created in your driving, rather than verging into specific demands of outcome. “I can’t find my front defroster while I’m driving since XYZ software update” is really great and specific, “so therefore Tesla and NHTSA should do ABC” is unhelpful and does not strengthen your case. No need to backseat-drive the NHTSA, just please do get the safety report filed.
Please try to widen your focus beyond that one single act. NHTSA and other bodies have a general responsibility to ensure safety of vehicles on the road, including preemptive as well as retrospective actions. That's what I was referring to. I see from other comments that you've been made aware (especially by Syonyk) of the relevant standards and procedures. Ignoring them now seems like just a way to pick a fight with someone who probably agrees with you on the general principle.
> No need to backseat-drive the NHTSA
That's an unnecessarily and counter-productively pejorative phrasing (and it's not particularly clever wordplay either BTW). We as citizens do indeed have a right (if not a duty) to express opinions about the regulations imposed by our government agencies. The fact that Tesla's update affecting safety could go out with no oversight is simply wrong. Raising that awareness - not just within NHTSA via a safety complaint - is part of making the wrong right.
I’m not onboard with telling them how to respond to that dismay. I know everyone will, but it weakens the problem report and muddies the waters. Filing a bug report without also including suggestions on how to fix the problem is a hard-earned skill for me personally, and I expect I’ll always wish it was more widely utilized by tech folks than it ever will be.
I agree that a safety complaint is not the right venue for proposing solutions, but when you used the specific words "our part in the NHTSA process" (as if there's no other) and "no need to back-seat drive the NHTSA" you seemed to be suggesting that people shouldn't make such suggestions at all. As I said, please widen your focus beyond that one simple act. Just as NHTSA is not the same as a software company, the "filing a bug report" analogy only captures one tiny part of their mission and operation as a public agency.
I hope the folks at Tesla paid attention. He’s one of the top UX people in the world.
His book, The Simplicity Shift[0], was one of the seminal UX books in my career. I still use many of the insights that I gleaned from it.
It’s a real short read (and a free download, now). It was written when everyone was still using flip phones, and was very useful in doing a brutal UX triage.
It becomes an internal battle of who finds a more clever way to present a design in a meeting to a product manager. I’m sure all of OP’s complaints sounded like very clever solutions in meetings. But that’s not where your users are.
Please. Keep your design team to a minimum. Design is not like engineering. More designers working on a single piece of software is counter productive.
At least in a restaurant, there's not a line of people who've just finished your food who are about to tell you how you should actually cook it.
In many cases it should?
I've seen initial versions of UIs having been created in a certain way because of multiple valid reasons (people that worked on it really put some thoughts into it), those reasons (priorities of fields, differentiation of informations, speed of entering data, overview of the data, ...) were never written anywhere => the next people that worked on it changed that because of any reason and the result was often worse - maybe by having guidelines/explanations associated to the UI (similar to what is done for the app's code) would avoid that.
It would be awesome if tesla let us truly customize the UI with some CSS, or at least accept a few themes that they bless. I want to have my energy usage always visible somewhere on screen, for example, without completely blocking the map…
Having driven the VW ID3 a few times, it‘s truly horrible in this regard.
The climate settings (yes, including fast defrost!) are „not available“ until the systems have booted up which takes forever.
Auto-Hold as a critical driving feature which had a hardware button before took me (as an engineer) a whopping 10 minutes to find in the third page of a random submenu.
The voice control is located as a touch-not-press button at the outer edge of a steering wheel so when (not if) you accidentally touch it in narrow turns, the confused useless voice blasts full volume at you while you‘re in the most complex driving situation.
It‘s as nobody had driven or user tested their cars before.
And here I am, an early technology adopter of two decades, feeling like an old man yelling I want my hardware buttons back.
Auto-hold is helpful with automatic gearbox. I find it helpful in a car but driving almost any pre-2010 manual car requires mastering the clutch and hill start.
I’d not call auto-hold critical, neither would I call the “defogger” critical for that matter.
The only two critical things in a car would be in my book: working brakes and tires in good condition. Everything else - meh. If it has a minimum 3 wheels and a steering wheel, I’d drive it.
I think you mean park
Putting it in neutral and letting off the break on a hill would end very badly
This is a strange take on it, defogging is rather critical unless you have a rag handy, you have to see.
Wipers - rather critical. Engine - very critical. Seatbelts - rather critical of you value your life Fuel tank that holds fuel - very critical.
Auto hold is far from critical and I have only encountered it on large trucks back when I was a truck driver.
In my city, I‘m just using car sharing anymore and they just have ID.3s. Now, half of them come with the feature on, the others off.
If you let the brake go at the traffic lights because the exact same model of car you took on the other way had auto hold activated, but this one doesn’t and the car suddenly starts moving towards the car in front out of the blue, believe me it feels quite critical.
Touchscreens (or touch surfaces) should not be used for any kind of vehicle function. period.
If you need to take your eyes away from the road, it is a shit ui.
If you can't feel but have to look to see the result of your interaction, it is a shit design.
If you need to look at the center console and down, it is even worse.
There is only one reason to get rid of all the buttons and switches, and that is design. because "ape goes ohhhh!".
And that should not be a consideration that is prioritized over safety.
Depends. SKU count is lower for sure. Wire count is less too. And in Tesla's case (Model S) where there is no real dashboard with a speedometer at all - it really would make a difference.
Didn't found how much Tesla pays for it's screen, but at $300 and even $500 I wouldn't be surprised if it would be still cheaper.
Tesla is bumping up against 1M cars built per year. Saving $10/car can add up to real money.
I'd add one more point specific to vehicle (or other safety-related) applications: if it keeps changing, it's shit. I shouldn't have to hunt around for where that control went today any more than I should have to hunt around for where it went the first time. That is why I think touchscreens with tactile feedback don't solve this problem, even though they're cool in general. That customizability is worthless because the controls shouldn't be changing anyway. Just put in real buttons, knobs, and so on.
Honda put a volume knob back on its 2021+ Ridgeline. Might not have been consumer feedback, but people hated the touch volume control in pre-21 models.
I loathe having to navigate menus and screen to find basic functions. My Honda had touch radio, with access to some set-up options, but daily functions are physical buttons. I like it this way. I’ll likely never buy a Tesla.
UI is like fashion. Practical matters seem to be ignored, but it's desirable on novelty alone. I fully expect the trend to reverse once it becomes "old and boring".
And, "airlifted"? I've not heard that expression before.
Want to add a button only available on the 4WD model? Then you have to have a blank dummy button on all other models, or two designs. Want to add/remove buttons on the next model year? Adds a grand to the cost of the car and the physical layout must be done 6 months before production starts.
Touch solves all of these problems. It’s super quick to install. Easy to adapt to different models and between years. Few things that can break.
The downside? Useless when driving. Tesla easily accepts this tradeoff, and will likely continue to do so.
Not sure how “a bit surprised” got mangled and interpreted as “airlifted”.
I guess it is clever in some regards but like others, the touchscreen on my Skoda (thankfully mainly for media) is impossible to use without taking your eyes off the road, which is truly dangerous if you need it for basics.
Back when Skeuomorphism was in vogue, it was far easier to train users to use computing devices. These days you "just have to know."
And, no, it isn't just Tesla. All the major tech companies have given up on usability (e.g. remember when Microsoft had a usability research lab and improved the products using lessons learned?).
"A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were necessary in the original. Skeuomorphs are typically used to make something new feel familiar in an effort to speed understanding and acclimation."
What if the sun is really, really bright today well now it's harder to see the contents of the display and we're back to conversation mode.
Close your eyes and navigate through the settings menu on your phone down a few menus to toggle a setting. I doubt you could do that first time beyond only opening the settings app itself. Why do we allow this to be implemented in cars where your attention on the road defines whether or not (in a non-trivial amount of cases) you or someone else lives or dies.
Relevant statute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.103
Even if they don't explicitly say it has to be an obvious button on the dash, it's a huge liability changing how basic safety equipment is operated.
If your smoke detector manufacturer changed how the test button worked with an over the air update, and as a result you failed to correctly test it, who would be liable?
Much in the same way, if someone cannot figure out how to use their defroster because a UX engineer decided to make it just so, the Tesla owner just drives off with a mostly iced up windshield because, and the Tesla owner gets into a crash because it's 7:00am on a cold winter Monday and they're running late, does Tesla share some liability for changing how basic safety equipment works?
If I was on the jury for that specific fact pattern, then it seems very likely that, yes, they would.
Probably the lion's share of the liability too (though definitely not 100%).
The 'beauty' of GCP is that I can effectively use my ipad's browser to manage some stuff on the go, or keep google cloud open in a small browser window on a secondary monitor, with full flexibility and full featureset. On azure, the pages don't always work, or break, and the app has way less functionality.
The best thing would be naturally a design that adapts better to display size than what they currently have, but I would call it badly optimized instead of bad design.
Their attitude to testing, safety or otherwise (i.e. braking) has been horrifically lacking, at best.
I'd be surprised if this move saw much more than a User Story from the MMI PM before going into production.
It would be unfortunate, but not entirely surprising given what we've seen, if the people responsible for these changes hadn't even tried them in their own cars for a reasonable amount of time. I'd say at least 1 year is reasonable, since all weather conditions need to be experienced.
Users want to spend as little time engaging with the UI but that’s hard to measure. The best way to minimize engagement time would be to just remove everything. But then there’s no data. So the thing that can be measured is chosen.
When people learn the UI the engagement metric trends downward and a new UI is designed which “fixes” the “problem”.
I didn't use defrost button for almost a year. Yesterday I had a snow storm and I wasn't able to find defrost function. It's appears you have to swipe up in climate settings of the app to see extra options. Why? Make it at least contextual. If I enable HI heat mode, suggest me these options if you think such option in hot countries is redundant, don't blame data.
Now just imagine an owner is not millennial on Gen Z, they will never find this option.
So with one simple update you turn them from proud tesla owners who heat up the car from snow from a warm sofa to a frustrated blocked by snow user. Even though the hardware is amazing.
::sigh::
Edit: This comment is tiresome. My dad owns a lot of the latest stuff and has no problem with it.
Between age and tech-savviness there is most definitely a correlation, strong enough that I wonder about causation (with exceptions of course, though those usually have an interest and extensive exposure or practice). One exception doesn't make every >50yo a tech wizard who'll know how to explore new design patterns with confidence. I would assume that's why someone downvoted your comment (though it'd be nice if the people that do can give feedback by themselves...)
I'm so glad there are an increasingly larger range of EVs to choose from. In Australia the choices are comparatively limited still, but more and more are becoming available. When we got our Tesla the choices were really Tesla or cars with really limited range.
I used to think I'd get used to the touch screen and muscle memory would allow me to do things while driving easily. Hasn't happened - I use the steering wheel buttons for changing the temperature, but everything else requires taking my eyes off the road for too long.
Test drove the new car and was surprised by how better physical buttons were. The cognitive load to drive it was so much less. After years of Tesla touch screen land, I think I'd forgotten how much easier and usable traditional interfaces are.
Things are in different places in different cars. Switching keyboard layouts would be significantly more complex.
I get that Tesla wants to save money, both in assembly costs and "lower cost = more potential buyers", but there has to be a large market of people who are willing to pay more for a more usable car.
Electric cars, with their batteries in 30-100 kWh range, lift this constraint - so designers have a field day
The 2022 Honda Civic is a masterclass in how to do automotive design right. It's a throwback when it needs to be, forward-looking when it should. The interior is beautiful and I predict it will age much better than these all-screen layouts (which may end up going the way of the phosphor display gauges common on many American cars in the 80s)
I particularly liked that the Escape had hard play/back/next (and a screen off!) buttons, and good use of screen-space. The CR-V wastes precious screen-space to always-present app shortcuts, as well as precious dashboard vertical space for just the volume/power button. The RAV4 has a bunch of function shortcut physical buttons around the screen which I think are also a waste of space: once you're in Android Auto/Apple Carplay, there's little reason to go back to the car's apps.
I think we're still in a pit of bad car dashboard design, after a precipitous fall into touchscreen madness. Tesla's the worst offender, but I'm pretty impressed by Ford's design.
(for comparison of RAV4 vs CR-V, see dash photos in this article: https://www.garberhonda.com/blog/2020-vehicles/2020-honda-cr... )
≥If you have two buttons, there is a third ‘object’ created, the decision a user must make on which button to tap. This cognitive load is invisible and rarely discussed but it can be a real source of confusion.
And it is becoming fashionable now to drop the main menu altogether. Why, to save 10 pixels? Darktable and rawtherapee both have a lot of awesome features, but no menu bar. So they each have there own ideas on how best to reimagine the UI, and then you have to search the internet to learn how to do the equivalent of File ≥ Save As.
It's cool to be sleek, stylish and unique. But not in dangerous machine interfaces. FFS. I even heard that Musk got rid of the yellow/black striped safety tape from his factories, because they didn't fit his aesthetic aspirations. And I honestly don't know if that is a myth or not. Given this latest evidence, it is believable.
What is interesting is the fact that so much research, and expensive lessons in engineering and design are now ignored so easily. I wonder if it stems from a deeper societal phenomenon of denigrating the past? The younger generations, caricatured in the media as angry Greta Thumbergs, seem to have declared their undying enmity towards an generation they blame for their apocalyptic fate. So they also reject, instinctively, symbols of those people, the visible signs of the past, and the lessons handed down.
This may be a meandering rant, but I do feel that there is a real problem in UX and UI that is hurting us all. And fixing that requires some questioning of the root causes. Why did we collectively forget good UI paradigms and accessibility best practices?
Whether it's worth it depends on the program and how often you touch the menu. For my web browser I go hours between menu uses so I prefer the space.
Today, I'd even gladly take the ribbon UI over burger menus every time.
- this hasn’t caused serious accidents (edit: which I’ve heard about)
- for all of Tesla’s (and other automakers’) focus on automating driving, they haven’t picked the much lower hanging—incredibly valuable—fruit of automating more non-driving tasks drivers must/likely will perform
- availability of basic safety-related controls isn’t regulated in a way that would have blocked this UI change
- the touchscreen-ification of car controls hasn’t attracted the same level of revolt and vitriol as has flat design on those same screens (guess what looks and feels like a button?)
We aren't going to hear about it unless someone files a lawsuit or otherwise makes a big attempt at publicizing it. It's something that we might hear about a few years after it shipped after a dozen or so people die in situations where literally everything else but the UI are eliminated as causes for the crashes.
I wasn't blown away. I rented it for a medium-length road trip, and was looking forward to autopilot on the highway. I found the features really lack-luster and difficult to use. You had to enable separate autopilot features individually, and they constantly disengaged for various reasons. My newish Honda honestly provides more of an ~~autonomous~~ driving experience with just adaptive cruise control + lane-keep assist. The control center was surprisingly complex and obtuse, and I missed carplay.
The experience made me really excited about buying something electric in the future, but I doubt it will be a Tesla.
You can make the physical button/key show any icon you want, and it can change so you can have menu-style systems without losing the physical pushbuttons.
0: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/nkk-switches/ISC1...
If so, then Tesla would need to dedicate one such button to the front defroster regardless of menu state.
Not only is it specifically discussed in the vehicle regulations (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.103), it has specific SAE standards for testing (https://www.sae.org/standards/content/j381_202006/).
I don't know if any of them specifically require a certain number of presses or such - I've never had an "old style" knob climate system that would automatically turn the blower to max in the defrost position, though that certainly helps the process. But neither have I ever run into a vehicle where the functionality is actively hidden. Scan for the defrost logo, front and rear, interact with the proper controls. To remove this obvious behavior from a car randomly speaks to an insane level of disconnect between the designers (who mostly operate on the concept of change for the sake of change, because any change makes it look new) and users (who, generally, would rather things stay where they were).
I don't care if my car UI wins international design awards for Excellence in Minimalism (ExMn) or something. I care that I can use it to make the various systems do what I want, or put them in a sane "Automatic" mode that then does reasonable things with them. And, further, I very much do care that they don't randomly change on me between trips in the vehicle.
In contrast, this would offer tiny screens, presumably in locations even more distant (considering the range of locations buttons appear in typical cars) from the windscreen than the Tesla screen is, and by switching their purpose, you create the neceessity to examine them before pressing?
I don't think it solves the problem of touch screens in cars though. The benefit of dedicated physical buttons in a car isn't just that they are physical. It's that you can use them without having to look at them. If you don't know what the button does (because it's changeable) then you can no longer simply use it without looking.
It's probably still better than a pure touch screen though.
The Range Rover evoque for example has a pushable wheel that sits on top of a screen (with a cutout in the center), so the part within the wheel will change based on the context.
I think that's a really good middle ground.
This is the first car, in my 42 years of driving (I'm 59) that I had to read the manual and "study" the UI before I could use it. And I still have trouble adjusting the temperature, etc, while I'm driving. It's way too confusing. I suppose I'll get used to it, but it's too much time with my eyes away from the road.
If I say anything about this to Tesla "true believers" (or even the folks on Hacker News!) it's always my fault.
They seem to genuinely think that mocking anyone who dare criticize the almighty Elon is a justifiable action. Instead, it makes them, and by extension all Tesla owners, look like children.
I've had my Model X for a year, and so far it's been in service for a total of 14 days. Of the 18 (!) issues my car has, they've only managed to fix 8. (!!)
And it's not because they're mysterious, complex problems. They just don't give a shit. They pretend that obvious issues are normal, or blame software for hardware problems, anything they can do to get rid of me.
I would never recommend a Tesla to anyone, now. I've never hated a car more.
Open to correction, though.
It has to be in the shop for 30 days and I'm currently at 14.
Insular groups and cults do not handle criticism well. Those who go against their dogma will be expelled, often not by the leaders, but by the members themselves. They serve as an immune system that keeps the leaders immune from being seen through a critical lens.
"For several years, Autopilot incorporated radar, and for a time Tesla worked on developing its own radar technology. But three people who worked on the project said Mr. Musk had repeatedly told members of the Autopilot team that humans could drive with only two eyes and that this meant cars should be able to drive with cameras alone.
They said he saw this as “returning to first principles” — a term Mr. Musk and others in the technology industry have long used to refer to sweeping aside standard practices and rethinking problems from scratch. In May of this year, Mr. Musk said on Twitter that Tesla was no longer putting radar on new cars. He said the company had tested the safety implications of not using radar but provided no details."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/technology/tesla-autopilo...
It's now a significant brand issue for me (ignoring any of the obvious actual issues). I don't want to be associated with that company.
I used to be a fan, but there are actual alternatives available now which I'll be pursuing in 2022.
They pushed a fix. Well, good. (Although given how quick the fix came out, I worry about the lack of testing).
Oh, now there's a slightly different phantom braking issue.
There's potential for significant problems (particularly with Tesla's ... laissez-faire ... attitude to certain things), as well as benefits.
This isn't like temperature, where somebody has a preference to see. Is my windshield clear of fog or ice? No? Turn on defroster.
I'll have to make sure I have it configured correctly and see how the car reacts next time. I've also not seen the "defogging limited by settings" warning; then again, the text is so small on the warnings I might have seen it but not been able to read it.
Tesla has to do everything differently, including replacing rain sensors that every manufacturer uses with a camera based AI that works less well than any car I’ve ever driven.
Teslas should be illegal on US roads until Autopilot is removed, renamed, and retooled, and significant oversight is put into place in Tesla's production and software release processes.
Ten years after I bought it Toyota warned me about the possibility some third party service people might've installed an improper part which could cause a problem. Tesla sometimes ships their cars from the factory with pieces of wood in them they got at Home Depot.
"Move fast and break things" is an absolutely intolerable attitude for a car manufacturer.
Then Tesla proceeded to demonstrate time and time again that no one that purchased their vehicles actually owns them. In fact, Tesla can upgrade and modify the car without permission, and they have repeatedly done so in ways that would terrify me. Either love that modus operandi, or don’t buy their vehicles.
I don’t want my vehicle’s controls to change — ever - without my explicit consent. I thus never expect to own a modern car, because it seems that every manufacturer is now guilty of these kinds of shenanigans. They have all lost my business. It’s the aftermarket for me.
I think the most egregious example of this is that paid upgrades like FSD don't transfer with the sale of the car. Those features are pinned to accounts, and you can't sell them. That way, Tesla gets to double dip by forcing both owners to buy the same upgrade.
Saw the last update hasn’t addressed any of the foundational issues and now it seems it’s created a few more.
I think the UI needs a complete overhaul. Mood board for the new UI should be a fisher price toy. (https://www.mattel.com/products/rock-a-stack-gkw58)
Also, the rear left door was misaligned from the factory.
Musk may deserve praise for dragging the auto industry into the electric era, but I'm not buying that thing.
Edit: thinking further, I think we can call it the "designed by nerds in California" disease.
Tesla is designed for the tech commuter on a freeway. Also in an area with a relatively mild climate and flat. They have no idea that the weather can change in 10 minutes as you go around the next hill. Even the turn signals are so smart they can't cover some situations more complex than a 90 degree crossroads.
Smartphones and laptops (especially Apple's) are mostly designed for a tech dude spending most of their time in a climate controlled office.
Iphones shut down when they're too hot/too cold. What if you have no choice because that's how the area you're in is?
The Apple laptops with the emoji keyboard were never tested outdoors, or they wouldn't get killed by the tiniest speck of dust.
https://images.hgmsites.net/lrg/2018-audi-tt-coupe-2-0-tfsi-...
Big knobs for varying things. Push them to toggle things. Important shortcuts — the aforementioned defogger being one of them — on the real buttons inbetween.
Physically rotate the whole unit to control direction and a physical flow control switch for every vent to allow per-passenger comfort.
Industrial design bliss.
https://www.mazda3revolution.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,o...
But as a design guy, I think it's a beautiful design, and the one that doesn't make too much compromise with UX. I'd be happy to take either.
https://cdn.bimmertoday.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/2017-M...
original article: https://www.bimmertoday.de/2016/10/25/mini-countryman-2017-f...
which is a lot like my 2012 S4.
I think I will hold out for a more traditional design. My Bolt's touchscreen isn't terribly obnoxious, and it still has physical controls for a lot of things, including the defroster.
If only it could charge faster on road trips, max is 50 kW. Typical is 40.
But we just want a normal car with an electric engine!
But I'm not sure that's the market Tesla want to be in that market. Other automakers might get there though.
Well, you can push the button on the end of the left stalk to trigger a wipe - and that causes the controls to appear as a "card" on the screen if you want to set the wipers manually.
In any case, go test drive one of those to see how you like EVs.
They do need to get the spontaneous combustion issue fixed, though.
A software update to address the issue nerfed battery life to 80%, though I think they've still promised to replace the batteries too.
I'm sticking with ICE for a bit longer.
The batteries only have the problems if 2 different manufacturering defects happen to occur in the same battery.
What I really want to see, but don't expect to happen, is removable batteries for all EVs. Chevy now has to eventually change the battery pack on all Bolts. While they are in there why not install an adaptor that accepts some hypothetical standard battery blocks that can be interchanged at battery swapping stations. Then long charging times can be skipped. No need for the battery to be owned by the car. Make it more like a cash refund for recycling bottles business model.
That's nonsense, ICE propaganda which has been thoroughly debunked. Cf. https://energypost.eu/latest-data-shows-lifetime-emissions-o...
> I ride a bike or go by foot
Excellent! Can't be beat in terms of co2 footprint!
I didn't do the research my own. You's is more recent, though.
- Tesla: 1 crash per 4.31 million miles
- Ind/average: 1 crash per 0.48 million miles
(I wish it were easier to retrofit in my 2008 Camry...)
Ping me if you want more info.
That's the main usecase for CarPlay for me.
What Tesla doesn't do well is voice control, including text message integration. Like, in theory that exists, but the text message integration failed for me after a couple weeks and nothing I tried could make it work again.
And no other apps supported by CarPlay, either. Things like Podcasts, different flavors of navigation apps, etc. You either get what Tesla offers, or nothing. Usually nothing.
And it's not like you can't have both. Tesla fans are good at telling me why I shouldn't want CarPlay, but that's just apologizing for Tesla. Other manufacturers offer CarPlay in addition to their own infotainment. Both my non-Tesla cars even put their own app in the CarPlay interface to make it easy to navigate around.
> It’s the context and the severe consequences that make it far more impactful than a poorly designed phone app.
Tesla is making their "two ton death machines" (to quote Elon himself) even more dangerous by making the controls unintuitive.
The "yoke" is what turned me off ever buying a Tesla motor vehicle. The designers have been allowed to run rampant, with nobody keeping their "experimental interfaces" in check.
I'll wait until Toyota makes an all-electric car. It'll be simpler, cheaper, and "just work" in the sense that I won't have to hunt around for basic controls just because some dingbat in California thought it made the dash look "cleaner" or whatever.
In check? I'd be willing to wager some money that the yoke was Elon's idea, or heavily encouraged by him based on his questionable sense of what is 'cool'. The Cybertruck is to me the next step behind The Homer (https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer).
What I want to see are very “tall” buttons WITH BORDERS ON THEM that are large enough to still hit when my finger slips down a bit, as it often does on such a display.
Is auto-defrost such a hard problem for a company that pretends to make self driving cars? Maybe it is, but if that's the case, don't make life harder on the driver by hiding the controls.
Video: https://youtu.be/mQM8PH9VLI8
Product page: https://the-evshop.com/products/integrated-dashboard-heads-u...
These days I'm lucky if there are keyboard short cuts for half of the functionality an application has. I'm now forced to stare at icons that don't give me a visual hint for what the keyboard shortcut might be. My iPhone expects me to know about brand new unguessable gestures just because I was forced to upgrade from a perfectly fine iPhone SE to a 12 because the screen died. An iOS update last night made my streaming music app stop working when the screen is locked and I had to infer what settings to change because all the help entries on the topic were for when settings were in different places.
I wish discoverability of user interfaces was still a thing, but clearly I am deemed to be in the unworthy of consideration minority. It's sad that things have gone so far backwards over the past 20 years that younger people don't even know what they're missing.
I hate to say it, but I think auto safety regulations will now have to incorporate basic interior functions as accepted e criteria. Corporations are too greedy and will compromise safety for money at any time (presumably app buttons could be a revenue stream, and that's why they want to promote it)
But I seriously wonder if any of the legacy auto makers would do this. I feel like they’re all way too conservative to do something this radical.
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-05-ford-infotainment-screen...
I was referring to the later.
We have a lot of history in the US showing that’s basically the only way to get/keep safety.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/interpretations/23055-2drn
And pass the FMVSS 103 Windshield Defrosting And Defogging safety test:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/tp-103...
Which specifically requires: photos of the instrument cluster to be filed. Has Tesla violated their certification by altering the instrument cluster without going through the appropriate 103 certification process?
The document also inherits from SAE J902A, which I can’t view as it costs money, even though it’s US law. Does J902A require a button to always be present, such that use of submenus for said digital button would be illegal under federal law?
I kept worrying that I was going to crash because I couldn't figure out how to do anything. Or if I did know how to do it, it took concentration and significant cognitive load to do it. Changing climate control settings, any audio setting more advanced than volume up or down, etc.
Even shifting into forward or reverse was difficult because you have to swipe forward to go forward and backward to go in reverse. While this may be intuitive on a purely touchscreen interaction only level, it is 100% backward from the standard shifter layout of literally every other car on the planet.
On a different note, the driving experience was also a bit unexpected. Normal driving was actually kind of tough because I didn't get used to the single pedal regenerative braking in the short time I drove it. It was hard to keep the car at a steady speed.
But it's still very fun to drive overall, mostly because of the insane acceleration and torque.
One thing I really don't get some companies put in electric cars(, even sometimes without option to turn it off!) is creep. It's an abomination that has no place in an electric car.
How does a radically new interior design help Tesla and their long term growth targets? Is it much cheaper to manufacture? Does it give drivers that learn the new paradigm a phenomenally better experience (no, it does not)?
If my opinion has any relevance, they should stick to improving performance, range and efficiency, price and vehicle reliability. Just leave the damn dashboard be already, a UX revolution is a turnoff for an bitter old fart like me, not a selling point.
What on earth do those 4 icons in the middle of the new UI even mean? My best guess of their meanings is "Phone, Audio, Radar, More" but that doesn't seem right. Also how am I supposed to know that "random number" refers to temperature?
Has anyone used an API or something to build physical buttons and knobs?
I'm still mad at the lack of physical keyboards on smart phones. Sometimes it feels like every innovation of the last 15 years has been a step backwards.
It is ironic to me that carmakers are so enamored with the smartphone experience that they want it to take over the dashboard, when we are explicitly disallowed from using them while driving for safety reasons.
A step backwards, for which party in the exchange?
The past 15 years have seen vastly huge improvements in the ability of user interfaces and such to collect widespread behavioral data that can be mined for prediction products! That you're upset with thus and such change, as noted by your interaction with the device and accelerometer data, is really important for better predicting what will sell to you!
But, yes, the past 15 years have seen a turn of consumer tech against the consumer. Now, the question isn't (shouldn't be?) "What can this thing do for me?" - it's, "What am I giving up by using this thing?"
That's because most of our recent consumer tech "innovations" don't first serve to make users' lives better, but to make shareholders wealthier. Users are an afterthought or acceptable collateral damage.
Though it is unclear is they were at fault or just fallguy.
- yoke "wheel"
- no turn stalk
- gearbox on touch screen
- centered display with no HUD or smaller driver panel
- this update
- increasing amount of complaints about car quality
cough cough vim users...
In 99% of text editors I don't need to RTFM to open, save, find/replace a string, or exit the damn editor. There are lots of things I might need the manual for but not the basics.
There's nothing different about the modality of operation of a Tesla. You could switch the touchscreen to a physical console and not lose anything, but modality is central to how vim operates, and becomes more valuable as you get used to it and need it more.
- When holding the steering wheel in the 10 and 2 position, my right hand covers the HUD and lane change camera
- Rear cam now has significant lag and stutters, so you never know if you are actually about to hit something (no, I don’t think it’s caused by the cable issue in the recall, came with v11)
- The infamous temperature control pop up covers the cam and HUD as well
I used to be able to fire off SMS messages on my phone while driving, without looking at the screen, because I knew my contact list and keyboards had that little dimple for feeling where 5 is (like your numpad does, if you're not too hipster to go without).
Sure, sometimes I got it wrong and texted something weird or to the wrong person, but by far, it was successful. Maybe it's just me, but I've still not been successful in learning how to write on a touchscreen keyboard, sure, I can type a message or using that swipey kinda thing, but I still have to look where I'm touching, no tactility, it's terrible.
1 tap is too many. These need to be physical knobs or buttons that stay in the same place so you can develop muscle memory.
Cars will not be self-driving for a number of years, so trying to evolve the UX/UI before that happens is setting up for disasters.
I guess it will take what all safety laws do, people have accidents and getting injured or dying because of the flaws. And inevitable lawsuits and more intense regulation than would have applied in the first place.
P.S. I am of course aware that heating the windows will also get rid of the fog, it just seems like an unusual solution to me.
Confirmed in the ‘98 Camry manual: “Turning the air flow control knob to wind- shield position turns on the defroster− linked air conditioning. At this time, the ”A/C” button indicator comes on regard- less of whether or not the ”A/C” button is pressed in. This is to clean up the front view more quickly.”
Like the manual, I have always just called that functionality ‘defrost’, never defog.
https://i0.wp.com/www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-content/uploads...
Edit: I'm also not exclusively blaming the author, I think when controls change Tesla should have a responsibility for retraining the vehicle operator. Obviously a painful user experience, but at least it would be a disincentive to move buttons around for no reason.
As noted elsewhere even in this conversation, the ability to locate a control via touch alone allows drivers to keep their eyes on the road (I realize that "where your eyes are pointed" != "where your attention is focused", I'll leave the research to others whether there is sufficient scientific evidence for this reason for tactile controls).
Additionally, physical controls might still be operable even in circumstances where the touch screen is rendered inoperable, and arguably can be made more durable than a big piece of glass.
It's commonly believed that the reason that Tesla cars only have a physical emergency hazard light button is because of US regulations (SAE J910 from Jan 1966[2]); the design minimalists at Tesla have moved it to the center of the ceiling console on the Model 3, to the point where there are many forum discussions of owners asking where the button is. IMO this pretty much proves the "minimalism gone too far" theory, if a critical safety control cannot be located by a nontrivial number of drivers. Similarly, the emergency brake in early Model S and X is a gesture on the shifter (direction control stalk), which is completely non-discoverable without RTFM.
I love Tesla. I've owned a 2015 Model S and a 2018 Model X. I sold the latter yesterday in anticipation of my new Model X that will be delivered in two weeks. My point is, I'm a fan.
That said, I'm concerned about my new Model X because of reports that they've removed even more physical controls (this time, they've removed the shifter) and are depending either on heuristics or touch screen interactions to set the direction that the car will go. The steering wheel has become a yoke (my uninformed guess is that this is more of designers trying to minimize the fact and appearance of driving controls and trying to visually convey the idea of a self driving car).
One weird note: For wanting to get rid of so much clutter, why haven't Tesla designers incorporated a HUD?
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=minimalist+design+of+tesla&... [2] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2011-19595/p-73
I get that he really wants a button as a guest in a car. But as an owner of a car, I would loathe 10 buttons I never want to push.
I'm not saying this just as an counterpoint-for-the-sake-of-arguing, I don't use voice control on anything - phone, TV, home automation, car, etc.
I know many people like it, and that's great, but I do not think at this point it has eclipsed hard buttons in things like vehicles where it should be considered the primary interaction method.
I need to go places, not dork with a new UI.
This guy should too.
Once they've done that (and it works, well) they can hide the button to do it manually in whatever submenu they wish.
Cars using a driver touchscreen need to fail their annual roadworthiness test. Take these cars off the road.
Had this come with automatic triggers for defrosting it may be have been okay
physical switches are best when on the go. a good example of this is the original ipod clickwheels (and even their touch sensitive replacements) which were way easier to operate in the car than competing audio players that hid everything behind menus.
Inefficient, but I can operate it without having to come to a complete stop
I'm sure there's a legitimate way to interpret this statement, but it still made me scratch my head a bit. :-)
I see what you did there :)
New UI is not good compared to the old one. But I'd take a Tesla UI any day of a maze of buttons
Oh man, my hair will go white soon if I have to tell people who keep making these kind of statements : either show this is causing accidents or lives with numbers or you’re talking out of your intuitive ass.
I agree with the rest - the new interface isn’t as intuitive and multiple interactions is required for various things that needed one tap before. It’s definitely worse and I hope it gets better.
What’s not intuitive to non-Tesla owners is that Tesla owners use the voice command extensively to get things done. Here’s a few of my day to day usage:
- Turn on recirculate
- Lower the temperature
- Play song X by Y
- Navigate to supermarket
- Fold the mirrors (for when parking in tight spots)
- Turn wiper high (no longer use this as the auto setting is almost perfect as of late)
You initiate the voice command by pressing a physical button on the steering wheel under your thumb. For majority of what I’ve listed above, you’d have to take your eyes off the road to either operate a physical button or tap on awfully unresponsive touchscreens in other cars. So as far as I’m concerned, I’m more road alert in Tesla than I’ve been in any other car. Add autopilot in the mix and nothing else comes close.
I wonder whether I’m an outlier here. The engineering investment to make zero-disruption voice control seems relatively minuscule, at least compared to all the other big-league AI/ML they’re up to. I’d rather have that than… just about anything.
- "Turn on recirculated air"
- "Set temperature to X degrees"
- "Get directions to Safeway"
- "Fold mirrors"
- "Turn on cameras"
all of these are recognized voice commands in my Audi.
Thus your point about rain sensors is moot - they run vision software to detect rain. It can improve essentially forever and at no expense to the customer.
Your ICE car may have a better rain sensor or auto headlight whatever now, but for a car that may be the most expensive investment, you will be stuck with whatever capability it came with, much like the feature phones of the 2000s.
Tesla owner attitude to a safety feature: "it doesn't matter that yours works great out of the box, and this one doesn't work, is one of the most complained about features and has been for years, what _really_ matters is that it _can_ be improved!"
If another manufacturers rain sensor was so faulty (because that's what it is) as Tesla's, it'd be repaired and replaced and no expense to the customer either. What's more is that it's a simpler system, that has worked reliably for 20+ years, and is a "solved problem", unless Tesla thinks there's some new rain situation that we're yet to encounter. Inventing a needlessly complex system that fails to do what a simpler, cheaper system does reliably and saying "oh well, you just don't get it, it can at least get better!" is cognitive dissonance.
Two images. One from a vehicle systems display on a Tesla, the other an Audi RS.
Tell me in an objective sense how one is "tasteful" and the other "disgusting".
You can certainly have a preference for one over the other, and there are nice aspects to both. But yeah, I'm not seeing it.
Edit: By "awful" I mean not just how it looks, but also how it works.
And the Tesla X in a circle button is awful if you ask me. But according to you its the epitome of taste.