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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you but in response to:

A tactile button has far fewer accuracy issues with positioning: if you can feel the button, you won't start pressing 2/3 off and then get further and further off until you're triggering something else, as happens all the time on touchscreens.

I gotta mention that I have a circa 2000 Japanese luxury car and the dials that control the stereo and the air conditioning are actually remarkably unpredictable. Turning the knob at all quickly will disorient the system and you can have a large increase in value or no-increase-at all (it seems to be an artifact of the knob changing a digital value). If you look carefully and move slowly they work but they essentially have all the drawbacks you describe with a touch screen - except you can't do something else entirely, thankfully. Obviously, better design would fix this so one does have to say "properly designed knobs are better".

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That's a bad implementation. Implemented well, a radio volume dial allows for predictable fine- and coarse-grained control. All of my cars have had good volume knobs that respond instantly and predictably, but I'm not surprised that there are bad ones.

There are no good implementations of touch screen buttons. However, there are some good implementations of touch sliders though, particularly on some LG microwaves (which someone else also brought up[1]).

I've written about these microwaves previously on HN, so I'll just quote myself[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31506358

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30873016

> Regarding microwave oven ergonomics, the best one I've seen doesn't have old-school dials, but a touch-sensitive slider bar. You may think this is bad, but it works very, very well. The front of the microwave has the time display, the time slider bar, and two buttons: stop/cancel and start/+30sec. Open the door and there are a few auto cook options and power level options. There is no number keypad at all; the slider bar gives you both very fine and coarse-grained control, depending on how fast you slide across it. It's all very intuitive, and I was very impressed with it.

I guess the "digital but with physical buttons" is the middleground. It still gives the designers the ability to mess around with acceleration curves that amplify fast movements, or to not sample the value fast enough to get coherent digital readings. I don't understand why they do this. As a university engineering student, I have a great love for linear systems, which usually is anything analogue. It makes everything easier.

For example, the focus ring of a consumer digital camera lens drives me nuts, it's practically impossible to do a pull focus reliably between two objects. If you do it a little faster or slower, it will be off, regardless of the travel distance. On the other hand, professional cinema lenses usually have actual mechanical focus wheels attached to ensure perfect reproducibility.

I agree! I could rant endlessly about all the bad physical interfaces I've used. My house is full of them. All the new appliances come with the flat buttons—are they capacitive or something?—they may or may not register when you press them, that often don't work when poked with a gloved elbow, etc. And dials like you describe that change random amounts or aren't debounced or whatever. There are probably more possible ways for physical things to go wrong than the small but common set of problems with touchscreens. It's more that they can go more right, too. (Or at least have their problems and benefits better matched to a task.)

Now that you mention it all applicances I’ve ever seen have those annoying flat buttons. If they made a microwave or oven control panel with the equivalent of a satisfying mechanical keyboard it would pretty well differentiate itself with a premium feel, though even the feel of a decent tv remote would be a huge improvement.

My microwave has four interface elements:

- rotary knob for function (microwave power level, defrost mode, some never-used oven modes) - rotary knob for time; this turns itself back towards zero as it unwinds - audible "ting" when timer elapses - physical press button for the door latch

I can heat food with a single turn of the timer knob.

Most microwaves require you to navigate. You can fuck off with that shit, not in my house.

Have you used the touchscreen in a 2000's-era Japanese car? It's horrific.

My 2017 Subaru has perfectly nice tactile controls for the radio, except that they’re disabled when the car is in reverse.

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