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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

Having tactile feedback would be preferable, I think, to a touchscreen with soft buttons. Normally, I'm reaching and not really looking at the screen when I mess with the nav/climate control/audio in my Audi; it's not a great UI, but better than reaching down to a big touchscreen.

What I think would be best is a gesture-based display. Touch anywhere on the screen, make a squiggle in some kind of pattern -- it's all relative vs. absolute.

Good voice recognition would also work, but I haven't seen this yet in a car.

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I think this is a really important point.

Sure, an infinitely flexible touchscreen has a nice wow-factor on the showroom floor, but when you're on the highway screaming along at 65 (because you're a good law-abiding citizen) and you reach down to change the radio station and hit adjust heat instead, and then the map destination, before having to take your eyes off the road to follow your finger to the right spot on the piece of glass - touchscreen not so good.

I'd give up some fancy full-color api driven whatever for a nice compliment of ergonometrically designed knobs and buttons any day.

As to voice, I think voice-feedback could be a good start. I have a hard-drive based music player in my car with an excellent audio interface. You can reach down, twiddle the knobs and browse through thousands of tracks without taking your eyes off the road at all because it reads the artists, albums, playlists etc to you. Very fine approach to a mobile interface.

You know what's annoying as hell? Climate control buttons so it takes either a ton of taps in succession to drastically change the temperature or one tap-and-hold. In my older Infiniti it has buttons to change the temperature and it's incredibly annoying. The next model year they changed it back to a knob because customers complained so much.

I wonder what Tesla did to make this a better user experience. I'm guessing: nothing.

> Good voice recognition would also work, but I haven't seen this yet in a car.

Ditto. This seems like the obvious solution to the future of UIs, especially when driving or something else that occupies your main concentration (walking, etc). In the age of Siri and Google Maps, you'd think your car could handle simple commands like "find 123 StreetName" and map to it in the city you're in or close to. I've hated the concept of voice recognition for a long time, primarily because I don't speak clearly enough for most of the technologies to understand me, but now that it's getting better I truly believe this is the future.

Now it's like (press button, wait for beep) "Find 123 StreetName". Response: "Tuning radio to 1100 AM". "Wait, no..."

For the future think Star Trek: "Computer, where is the nearest gas station?" (note: addressing the computer to activate instead of pressing a button on the steering wheel = genius). Then a kindly female voice responds: "There is a Chevron and a 76 at the next exit, would you like me to route you to one of those?". "Yes, route me to the Chevron", etc.

> Having tactile feedback would be preferable, I think, to a touchscreen with soft buttons

The 2004 Prius (and many other cars after that) has proven that touchscreens are viable for key functions... certain functions are not accessible in any other way (e.g.: climate control)... and touchscreen failures are not widely reported as a problem.

I have an older Lexus that is basically the same platform as that. It's great - I've never driven anything that has as painless a UI.

I spent the weekend with a Ferrari and it was pretty unreal how hard it was to use (you can't change the radio station without turning off the nav display, etc.)

Lambo (well, or Audi R8) is even worse; until I think 2012 MY, you got the same crappy RNS-E of a 2001 Audi A3, not even the Audi MMI from the A6.

> What I think would be best is a gesture-based display. Touch anywhere on the screen, make a squiggle in some kind of pattern -- it's all relative vs. absolute.

Audi does this somewhat already on a couple of models, you can write letters with your fingers to enter waypoints or call someone.

Touchscreen is a must have for the nav unit, specifically for browsing the map with the pinch zoom and drag panning. Multi-purpose programmable physical buttons are nice in theory but in practice they suck donkeys balls if you pardon my French. Inconvenient and more importantly they make the UI feel unfinished and temporary. Should they have customizable labels similar to those of the Optimus keyboard - that would've solved the problem, but at what cost.

With regards to a good voice recognition - the current generation on BMWs is really good, especially compared to the one from two years ago that was bloody awful. One thing that I do miss from the handsfree system is an ability to use different voice packs. It'd be super cool to have a dude with a heavy Indian accent :)

The main thing I really use is steering wheel controls; being able to one-touch answer incoming phone calls, up/down volume, mute, switch tracks (which are iPod playlist tracks, etc.) without removing my hands from the wheel is very important at "55 mph".

There's a fairly powerful tegra chip in there, so I imagine that voice recognition would be a software update away:

http://pressroom.nvidia.com/easyir/customrel.do?easyirid=A0D...

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