"Touchscreen all the things" was cargo-culting. Apple made a trillion dollars with touch screens, therefore we should use touch screens too.
If an operation is infrequent and doesn't need to be made when driving, burying it in a touchscreen menu sounds great: conserve those physical control surfaces for stuff that matters so you don't have a ridiculous surplus of buttons. You can go and put the majority of functions on touchscreen menu hell. But don't go and put the climate or windshield wipers or even audio modes on touch surfaces, please. :/
That's a bit of a straw man. No one seriously says literally every function needs a button.
And it makes sense to bury seldom-used things in menus. However, there's no reason those menus need to be touchscreen menus.
E.g., in my car, care settings are in a menu, but the screen for it is in the instrument panel and controlled by buttons on the steering wheel. I believe the reason is when it was made they still offered a low-end trim level without a touchscreen entertainment system. This menu is better than a touchscreen, but IMHO it would have been better with done with menu-buttons in the center console screen.
It's not a straw man; it's nuanced agreement. It's a shame that people expect argument so much that they can't see where the edges of one opinion are being offered.
> However, there's no reason those menus need to be touchscreen menus.
Might as well be touchscreen menus. Using up and down buttons to pick things in a modal interface isn't clearly superior to a touchscreen for experienced users and worse for new people.
A good button menu system is better than a bad touchscreen, especially with experience. But in a rental car, I appreciate the touchscreens to pair my phone, etc.
I understand that, that's why I said it was "a bit" of one.
> Might as well be touchscreen menus. Using up and down buttons to pick things in a modal interface isn't clearly superior to a touchscreen for experienced users and worse for new people.
IMHO, if you have the space, f-key/button menus (e.g. the hardware shown at https://www.informatique-mania.com/en/tutoriels/quest-ce-que...) are better than touchscreen menus.
I like avionics and ATMs where you see these. They're great for experienced users with relatively fixed functionality.
You can't tradeoff UI factors so easily, though. If you usually have 5 options, and found you have 6 somewhere-- you need to break up the section or add a page, etc. And if you add an option the user UI workflow completely changes.
While, with a touchscreen you could accept a smaller target for the least-used option, and adding a new target on a page doesn't change things too much for users (and is arguably more discoverable).
I don't miss noisy potentiometers :D
And having a bus with user operations being streamed to it means that designers can choose mappings and behaviors late.
The issue is the delay. I have a lot of amplifiers with knobs that are perceptually instant, even if they really are encoders behind the scene. Stuff is fast enough now that there's no reason for delay. I've built control systems that use encoders that operate at 1000Hz over slower embedded networks than are in modern cars.
Figure maybe 65dB of useful dynamic range in a car + 10dB of range needed based on levels of the recording. That implies you want about 150 steps.
Go ahead and display a number between 1-30 if you want-- that's probably good for usability. I can find "13" and be close to what I typically want. Just, have the actual control surface move 5 steps per number so that I can fine tune.
I agree with that, but I don't see any added value of a touchscreen for the other things you mention. It could as well be a deep menu that is still accessed with many button presses to drill down into it.
I think if I'm not driving, the usability of picking from menus by touch is usually nicer than using buttons to navigate.
If I'm really experienced with the controls, buttons are better than a meh touchscreen.
In a rental car, I appreciate the touchscreen menus.
Swipe keyboards are good enough and physical keyboards are out of fashion long enough that it’s been a while since I’ve seen an bluetooth keyboard build into a phone case. But I haven’t actually tested my preference in years.
In similar way as current/recent SUV cargo-culting. For premium performance manufacturers like Porsche or BMW it didn't make sense, why have bulky car with shitty driving characteristics, slower, much higher roll risk, much higher center of gravity, much smaller inside space than usual family wagons, that costs more to run and buy it from premium brands... thats what you have Fiat Peugeot etc for. Especially for people who drive on paved roads 99/100% of the time, ie typical soccer moms.
I know that inexperienced drivers enjoy higher seating position and feel safer, but I would suggest taking some driving lessons if thats a problem for a given driver, much better results and resulting real safety.
Yet Cayenne and X5 and whatnot sold like hot cakes for premium money because footballers and other celebrities bought them, so eventually every manufacturer jumped on that bandwagon, screw any logic if people buy it. The more performance the brand, the longer it took them to pick this trend up, and thus Ferrari is the last (from what I gathered, not following this topic seriously). And so folks today buy crossovers and god knows what other names are in vogue these days, which are tiny short cars with high ground clearance. To drive in cities.
Couldn't agree more. I have ~50 hours of seat time driving a high performance mid engine car on a track but in any amount of traffic I prefer my truck. Better visibility, and (imo) better safety due to weight.
It's rarely brought up but even an elementary understanding of physics makes it obvious that less massive things are more fragile and susceptible to deformation than more massive things, all else being equal. Sadly that last point involves a zero sum game: the safer a heavier vehicle is to its occupant the more dangerous it is to others. Even more sadly its a game many people are forced to play.
1. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...
Worse safety for everyone but the driver I would argue. Same for most heavier cars, such as SUVs.
Touchscreens let you build arbitrary UI/UX. You can click anywhere and do gestures anywhere and type anywhere. When there doesn't need to be UI, like when watching a video, the whole phone is the screen. So the UI can optimize for the best UX. It's much more powerful.
With physical buttons, software is pigeon-holed into UI designed around those buttons. It's a massive trade-off. Something we take for granted like navigating a website becomes much more tedious when you only have buttons.
Just look how much effort goes into making software-specific hardware like the scroll wheel/drum on old-gen music players like the iPod, yet it doesn't solve something as simple as typing in a song search query.
Because you are always staring at the display while using it?
Why would I want I/O to become IO?
It would be great, there is very little in the way of a worse UI than trying to use a touch screen in a moving vehicle.
IMHO, that's one of Apple's biggest competitive advantages. They have so much cachet that everyone assumes whatever they do is "best" and mindlessly apes it. That way they never have any real competition, because followers are always at least a step behind.