Touchscreens are out, and tactile controls are back
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Lack of tactile feedback for the sight-impaired is the obvious part but there is another thing:
Touchscreens just stop registering your touch when you get old. The older you get the less moisture there's in your skin, which at some point makes touch screens ignore you.
https://www.gabefender.com/writing/touch-screens-dont-work-f...
Turning the page is the main thing I do on an ebook, having a button on the side is so much more convenient than touching the screen, I don't obscure what I'm looking at, and I don't smudge the screen.
For touchscreens dry fingers are also called "zombie finger" [1]. The screen registers the too minute change in electrical field as noise and rejects the touch event. Some sweat (but not too much) on the fingers makes all the difference.
[0] https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/sponge-finger-wet...
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2015/06/zombie-fing...
Source: when I was 5 I saw my grandmother, RIP, doing that and asked her about it. She explained that as she got older her fingers got drier, and now it's just easier to flip pages that way.
I may try to suggest that the other grocery stores adopt this brand but they are big national chains and I doubt they would be interested.
for reference, this bag says PULL-N-PAK® Titan Supreme 28-2024-11-2 www.crownpoly.com
There's always a fraction of a cent to be saved by adding slightly less adhesive, using slightly cheaper plastic, replacing the perforating tool less often, etc.; couple iterations in, the solution stops working reliably. There's no back pressure, because it's not like anyone is choosing where they shop by whether the single-use plastic bags are easy to open.
Oddly, the plastic bags in the produce section do not have that problem. I now just grab one of those and use it for my meat.
Licking or wetting your fingers for this purpose has been a standard practice across the globe, when people are dealing with turning pages (e.g. for accounting), counting tickets, coupons, paper money, etc. It was never just something older people did (except in the sense that the practice is not as common now, as people in the US and Europe don't need to do it that much anymore, due to changes like reduced use of cash, etc.).
So, you might not have seen it since the need is mostly obsolete in most of the west, but it's still a thing elsewhere, and was very much a thing in the US and Europe too until a few decades back.
So much so, that there were office gadgets made for this, basically a base holding a small sponge, that you would add water to, and use it to wet your fingers for counting/changing pages. They're still very much sold:
https://www.amazon.com/money-counting-sponge/s?k=money+count...
(That realization scares me, as it means I too might become an obnoxious finger-licker in a few years.)
Yeah, I'm starting to understand why old people may be past the point of giving a damn about the optics.
--
Source: bank teller training years ago. We were supplied (always) with little moistening pads at our tills.
There's always moisturizer.
That's the other thing about it, when it was being done in the past: people weren't so appealed by having bodies, or frightened of life and anything that's not sterile.
So they weren't as grossed out by everything - including a person merely licking their fingers to count some pages or notes...
Sanitary in quotes since I'm not sure a pot of wax collecting stuff from your fingers for months or years is much better than licking.
no, but older people often tend to dryer less sensitive skin, so I'd wager it's skewed that direction. Source: am approaching "old".
People put their fingers on all kinds of things other people have touched: doorknobs, elevator buttons, shopping basket/cart handles, etc. Adding a moist pad to that isn't going to change anything. Keeping people's hands out of their mouths, however, might.
(I'm asure it was always a bit nasty but when it became a deadly move, my habits finally changed...)
I just find something cold in my cart and use the condensation to wet my fingers
(No, I don't touch the sprayer, just a drop.)
I recommend re-reading it in a few years. Ecos books grow with you; the more you learn about the world and history, the more you'll find in nuance in that book. Maybe more true for me - as a teenager I've read it first as a mostly weird detective story. Later re-reads made me more interested in the weird parts.
There is, by the way, a separately published Postscript to the Name of the Rose with some notes on writing the book.
Nice pull.
Here you can see it on 0:23 of video tour: https://marketplace.vts.com/building/400-capitol-mall-sacram...
It turned out each winter I make screens much more dirty and my fingers are drier. Touch gets more random, fingerprint readers success rate drops from 100% to more like 50%.
Nowadays I make sure I clean the screen with actual dedicated products often, and make sure I keep hands moisturized. It works well, even if the latter contributes to the former.
Haven't changed phone in over 2 years and still don't feel the need for change :)
I don't tend to have the issues everyone here is talking about, but those things never work for me on the first try.
Exactly, i do the same thing with my (new) Macbook Air, it makes the TouchID sensor work much more reliable (also, i use my middle finger by the way...)
You got it (mostly) right :-) Just one minor mistake: a native would write, "Would breathing on it be a contactless way..." in order to indicate that this is only one of several possibilities. You could also say, "Would breathing on it be the contactless way..." in order to indicate that this was the only possibility.
The rule here is really weird. The qualifier is only required when there is a singular noun being used as an object. "Breathing is way of doing it" sounds weird, but "Breathing and licking are ways of doing it" does not.
"English is super-weird" sounds right. "English is super-weird language" sound weird.
/s but not so much
EDIT: back in the day cashiers had a thing to moisture your fingers flipping the bills/notes/papers
(I have to open countless garbage bags, licking is not an option)
I really hope it’s not the case that capacitive sensors are somehow preferred from a security standpoint (i.e., harder to trigger with a robot).
"Excess blood sugar decreases the elasticity of blood vessels and causes them to narrow, impeding blood flow"
It's a trick some flute-players use for the pinky of the right hand, so that it works better rolling between the C, C#/Db and D notes on the bottom. I saw it mentioned in some tutorial once and thought: "no way", and was amazed at how well it worked.
I never really asked myself how it works - something to do with skin on (dead) skin working up some friction, I don't know. I'd be curious to know if it would have worked with your YubiKey issue. But maybe it's too late to try now!
Now ask anyone with a touch screen in their car what their error rate on that thing is. Even the really good ones are pretty bad.
Touchscreens don't work quite as well for this. Even if it allows for input queuing, you often still need the previous screen to finish drawing to have a frame-of-reference for your presses. Even the slightest delay turns into an annoyance, and when it involves some kind of drag-scrolling a 50ms delay already becomes unbearable.
This makes it hard to hit the desired area on a vertical touchscreen at near full extension of the arm.
The ultimate form of accessibility is not 'designed for impaired people' it is a system that does what you want without having to think about it or lift a finger.
This is heartbreaking. The woman is being excluded through no fault of her own, and she blames herself. I find this to be a common for people who don’t think of themselves as disabled but are made disabled by bad interfaces. They think there must be something wrong with themselves because everyone else has such an easy time, when really it’s the technology.
And how is this supposed to work? Like, at all? Does the urgent care place have 2FA set up for every insurance company? Just the insurance companies they accept? What about folks that don't have their phone on them (which is reasonable to forget if you need medical care urgently, even if it's not ambulance-grade urgently).
Plus, you've got the fact that the elderly are both a major market for medical services and famously techno-phobic....
In my experience, using the identity card is more common. Only drivers have a driver license, but nearly everybody has a identity card (and every identity card has a photo); and AFAIK, the identity card is one of the mandatory documents to get a driver license.
On one hand, we have a modern banking system that allows instant money transfers to anyone at any time, and the government is developing its own cryptocurrency. With our electronic voting machines, the country knows election results within two hours after polls close.
On the other hand, each company, including those providing essential services, creates its own solution without any regulatory oversight. This fragmentation extends even to official government services.
In the case I mentioned, each private health insurance company freely determines its own procedures for patient check-in at affiliated clinics. With my insurance plan, my ID card is sufficient--for now.
A lot of disabled people today subscribe to the "social model of disability" [0] rather than the "medical model". Under the social model, the obstacle is not some property of the individual experiencing an access issue, but are created by a system made by other people who didn't provide alternative access methods. Society and its inventions disable, rather than the individual's condition.
Clearly, disabled people have mental or physiological conditions that produce non-mainstream access needs. None of them deny that... but the social model invites us to take a society-wide ownership of this, and to better support a wider range of access needs by default.
In contrast, the medical model tends to situate the disability within the individual, based on their physiological condition. This tends to put the ownership on the individual (or their immediate carers), which in turn tends to perpetuate exclusion and access challenges.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_model_of_disability [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_model_of_disability
A blind person can't participate in society to the same degree that a sighted person could, but the same is true of the entire world. We can (and arguably should) make their life easier by changing society, but unless you fix the root problem, they'll forever lack visual experiences.
From another angle, life without a human society still has its challenges. Adding a society removes some and adds new ones. Some people only have problems with these new challenges, some struggle with the old as well. These two scenarios should be distinguished, perhaps by applying the "social" and "medical" models appropriately.
But not everybody wants to gain the experiences that would come from not having their condition. (This is especially true in the Deaf community[0], but can be seen in other communities as well.) And honestly? I feel that's a very valid viewpoint to have. The reason they "can't participate in society" to the same extent is because society doesn't let them!
Thankfully, people are starting to realise that.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/understan...
Scott Alexander convincingly argues against that model and provides a better one: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-the-social-model-of-...
>I’ve never heard anyone willing to defend the actual Social Model the way it’s taught in every course, written on every website, and defined by every government agency. Everyone says they mean the Interactionist Model. Yet somehow, the official descriptions still say that disability is only social and not related to disease, and that you may only treat it with accommodations and not with medical care.
> the topic is taught in a way that only occasionally nods to such a compromise; more often the Medical Model is condemned as outdated and bigoted, and the Social Model introduced as the new, acceptable version that people should use
He quotes many sources that take the social model literally even in the 2020s
And regarding the BPS model: I stand corrected about my agreement - the point he makes about it I very much disagree with:
>This isn’t an exact match for a model of disability; the Biopsychosocial Model is most often used to explain the causes of illness, not how it impairs people. Still, I think there is a close enough analogy that it could be easily extended to disability.
He really shoud at least have read the Beginners Guide to the WHO ICF (which is deeply rooted in the BPSM) https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/icf-beginner-s-guide...
Both the model as a model of disability and a focus on impairment can be found front and center.
When I got to college, they gave everyone Thinkpads with fingerprint readers. Mine had trouble reading my fingerprints for about 2 months. I guess that I scrubbed my fingerprints away with all that grease, and it took that long for my fingerprints to "regrow" enough for the sensor to recognize them.
I can use a proper touchscreen phone just fine, as its OS is advanced enough to run a screen reader, and its touch screen can precisely locate where it was touched and supports flicks, swipes and multi-finger gestures.
Proper touch screens have some very important advantages, notably being able to show different controls at different times. You want to have a different button layout when you're typing a text than when you're watching a movie or playing a game. Physical buttons make this impossible.
Even blind people benefit from this, modern phones have a mode where you can use a touch screen to input characters in Braille, treating different parts of the screen as keys on a brailler (think piano with 6 keys). Each combination of these keys, pressed or touched at once, inputs a specific character[1].
Now touch controls, like those you can find on a washing machine / coffee maker, make no sense. There's no screen behind them, so they're not dynamic in any way, and the primitive software of such devices (as well as the need to seell them in multiple countries without providing specific support for any particular human language) make accessibility impossible to achieve.
For many years now we've had various interfaces that use physical buttons whose function can change at different times during operation, the current function being indicated by the screen: Old fashioned ATMs with 4 buttons on each side of the screen, many business-class feature-phones had "soft-keys", even old DOS programs that used Function Keys are conceptually similar.
There are differing degrees of compromise vs utility.
Touch controls have one really big advantage, they have no switch to wear out, and no opening to get water damaged. Touch might be a worse UX, at least to highly tactile people who are aware of their fingers often, but it can last decades with the cheapest imaginable hardware.
That said, i use the physical knobs a lot more often, since your finger position will easily follow any moving button and nudges in rotating or shifting knobs feel super satisfying.
But many modern cars (ex: Teslas) use capacitive screens like on smartphones.
This is yet another example of accessibility being in everyone's interest.
I had no idea that was a thing but it makes sense now that you said it. I will now be a lot more understanding when older folks have trouble using their phones, self-checkout, etc.
Pinch-to-zoom was revolutionary for people with low vision. VoiceOver was revolutionary for people with no vision. Blind people ended up being early adopters of iPhones because of how much better the UX is compared to phones with physical controls, where memorization of the controls and menus is much more necessary.
The flexibility of UI enabled by touchscreens was revolutionary for people with dexterity and cognitive issues. See the Assistive Access feature, for example, which has made Jitterbug phones obsolete for many people.
Touchscreens not responding to dry skin is a real problem, though I’ve only ever seen that on cheap hardware. Testing the device is obviously necessary.
I still want physical controls for simple and common cases, such as the vents in my car. But I now think of them more in terms of convenience and safety rather than accessibility.
But more to the point, I love my clients and friends with such issues but they don't drive and shouldn't drive.
TV remotes are among the most inaccessible consumer electronics devices. They can be made much better with a touchpad or a phone app or even a voice assistant. It’s still nice to have physical volume controls, of course.
Now your phone can act as a remote. Just swipe down from the top right to access the control center and tap the TV remote icon.
I personally like the blocky design, but a phone case can make the edges very rounded if you like that. And of course the touchpad is much improved with it being on your phone screen compared to the physical remote.
Periodically, I have to remind them to turn their volume up when they complain they cannot hear me. Their grip on the phone can inadvertently hold the "volume down" button.
Their reduced motor control mixes up tap versus long press and accidentally triggers all kinds of functions. I've seen the home screen littered with shortcuts accidentally created in this manner.
Somehow, they periodically managed to call me, put me on hold, and call me again. I'm sure this was not intentional, but the rapid replacement of on-screen buttons causes different functions to be activated without any real awareness of what is happening.
The "Emergency" button on a locked phone screen can be misunderstood as a sign of danger.
The random assignment of a color icon to names on a recent calls list, contact list, or favorites list can be misinterpreted as some kind of message about the health of that named individual.
I tried to disable emergency alerts, but I fear the chaos at the care home if an emergency alert comes through and triggers that horrible alert siren.
It really makes you wonder, and by that I mean it really makes me think unflattering things, about the monoculture of 26 year old infants who designed and built all of this.
If they would see beyond their own circle of friends and hire someone with varied life experience, the business may actually benefit.
It's the same people who put charging ports under the mouse so that you can't use it while it is charging. Otherwise the consumers could choose to have it always plugged in, which would make it look like an "ordinary" mouse, and the designers can't allow that :-)
They don't actually seem to list any phones on their site, but some image search brought up a phone with big buttons to call a few specific contacts.
One example is card payment terminals. Vision impaired users don't know where the buttons are for entering the pin code. On a phone they could allow the phone to read out numbers, but you don't want your pin numbers to be read out loud in a public space.
There’s so much misunderstanding of what it’s like to be vision impaired here and what solutions are available for common tasks.
Anyway. Tactile input is generally better where an efficient placement of physical input controls is possible.
Garmin is a seldom example of a company doing it right with the Edge 840. They merged the tactile 530 and the touch 830 into one device. The best of both worlds. Guess what I prefer?
It is the Edge 530. Better screen to body ratio :)
The rise of the touchscreens are an accident. Because MBAs believe iPhone == touch == good. It isn’t. The iPhone is just small, physical switches expensive (remember the slider smartphones) and you can merge output with input (this a pro and a con). Nice when you want to zoom a map. Horrible if Okay changes the position, worse when the keyboard requires the half screen and interaction is generally ineffective.
I recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things
1. Layout your tactile interface in a way that it allows the user to create a mental model of it.
2. In best case this model exists already.
3. Make it hard to use it wrong.
4. Make it easy to use it right.
5. Also applies to the output. If the turn indicator is ON, make it ON.
Can I express an wish?
Dear device manufacturers. Please used high quality switches with travel, resistance and a click „BIPPITY-BUMP“. Add a spring. Built in a indicator light within!
The rise of the touchscreens are an accident. Because MBAs believe iPhone == touch == good. It isn’t.
With the most common touchscreen implementations:
• user must hover hand above screen to avoid errant 'clicks' which is physically tiresome during prolonged use
• user cannot locate button without looking at screen, and feedback, if any, is several ms delayed (ie: till audio 'click' sound plays)
• user cannot easily control GUI on large, or multiple displays, since input-to-output scale is 1-to-1
• user cannot view the content under the target without workarounds (eg: iOS's loop widget) since user's finger blocks part of screen, and a human finger is relatively large compared to screen
You mean the magnifying glass during text selection?
From the map screen, to change zoom, hold a button until a +/- appears next to other buttons. Use those other buttons to zoom in or out. To pan up or down, hold that same button again, until up/down arrows appear next to the other buttons. Use those other buttons to pan up or down. To pan left or right, repeat this process once more.
The entire value proposition of a bike mounted map is to be able to navigate without stopping to use your phone. But if the interface to adjust the map is this cumbersome, stopping to look at a phone is the smart move, never mind the better user experience.
Which they are, given the application. It also goes beyond size and cost. How long will those tactile buttons last, particularly given that the device is meant to be used frequently and is frequently stuffed into a pocket?
Don't get me wrong. I have an ereader with buttons because I like buttons. Yet those buttons are not going to endure the same amount of abuse as they would on a phone.
Decades. Which I guess is too much for a world that's driven by "value engineering".
I mean, we actually have hard data for this. "Dumb phones" (even those that would run J2ME and had apps and stuff) can easily last for decades, and their buttons work fine after 5+ years of intensive use[0]. In contrast, it's rare to find someone whose smartphone lasted more than a year without getting its screen cracked, or three years without at least one screen replacement job.
--
[0] - I would know - I graduated high school around when the first iPhone was released. If you weren't of similar age at that time, then believe me when I say it: there is no tougher test for durability of a phone keyboard than having been used by a teenager back then. There was no Messenger or WhatsApp, phone calls were expensive, and videocalls were the thing for super rich, so all the friendships and romance of that age meant texting 24/7, hammering the shit out of the keyboard, day in, day out, for years. Never once heard of anyone's keyboard breaking under the load.
(It was better a decade ago, when smartphones were still thick and made of hard plastic. Now that they're all thin and metal, they're too slippery to handle safely.)
* Shall not be needed for a well designed device.
* Covers are ugly.
* Make devices even bigger than they are already.
* Don’t protect against high forces.
Manufacturers get away with weird design decisions.
* Hard (fragile) screens. Somewhat okay?
* Camera lenses extending out of device body.
* Camera bump extending out of device body.
* Glued sealant instead of replaceable sealing rubber (Apple *does not* guarantee that the iPhone survives water - the glued sealant ages).
* Glas backside to make it more fragile. Which improves Qi-Charging needed for metal bodies. Which wouldn’t be needed with polymers bodies.
Oh, I know that alternatives existed. Complete keyboards. Larger screens (but by no means large by current standards) with touch input complimenting the keyboard. I had one of them. Yet it was nothing compared to what we have today, and I doubt that we could have what we have today with what we had then (buttons!) without seriously compromising the size of the device or the durability of those buttons.
It was made in 2019, if I could hand it to you I think you'd reconsider your beliefs about what is and isn't possible, it's a very well-made device, the keyboard is lovely. It has one pretty fun feature which might be counter to the spirit of this thread - the entire keyboard is touch-sensitive and functions as a touchpad area. Software support for this is hit-or-miss, but I'm going to miss it when I have to get rid of it for an all-touch device. Especially I will miss being able to easily use my phone when there's rain drizzling.
How? I've used smartphones without any case since the Galaxy S1 and I have never had a cracked screen.
But yeah, I definitely prefer physical keys too. Since the Blackberry Passport every newer phone was a disappointment. If they made a new one with updated hardware and unlocked Android I'd preorder it immediately.
The only smartphone in my close circles I know to have outlasted its usefulness without having its screen cracked is an LG P350 - my first ever smartphone (which incidentally was barely powerful enough to run its own OS; from then on, I always just saved up money and bought a flagship). Since then, I've seen friends getting new Pixels one day, and breaking their screens the next; in the Galaxy line alone, I had my S4 screen replaced twice, I personally replaced the screen in my wife's S3, my S7 died with a black screen after hitting the pavement (it was in a case, but the impact angle was unlucky); my wife just got the screen replaced on her S23. A family member broke a new Galaxy Tab when their briefcase hit the ground, etc. Same for cheaper devices too.
(EDIT: well, OK, my wife's Huawei P8 didn't live long enough to get its screen broken - 6 months in, it wasn't able to make a phone call without freezing. Replaced it with an S9, whose screen theoretically never cracked - instead, at some point, top half of the display got hue-shifted towards pink.)
Things got much worse when phones became glass/metal instead of glass/plastic; I personally am not brave enough to operate a modern smartphone without a case while standing on hard floor (bathroom tiles, or pavement outside).
I don't know - maybe myself and people around me all have really bad luck? Regardless, before smartphones, neither the screen nor the buttons were particularly fragile; you only ever worried about breaking the plastic case (or the flip mechanism in flip phones) after using the phone as a hammer one too many times...
That is interesting. People usually just buy screen protectors and call it a day since screens are pretty fragile and phones hate gravity.
Possible reason/s for not having a cracked screen for 15 years:
1) No kids around
2) No wife/fiancé around
3) not much of a social life
4) never walked in public with phone in use
5) phone only used in certain places with carpets to cushion fall.
6) only ever had 2 smartphones. The other is the beefy CAT phone.
7) not a sports fan
8) the phone is hardly ever used for anything more than a simple call or text.
Is it any of the above?
Button manufacturers rate their products for this kind of thing. ie. "10k cycles" (not that high), "1M cycles" (better), etc.
So it really depends upon the device manufacturer to pick something appropriate.
Random examples:
• https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/push-button-switches/1336473
Datasheet for that has 10k cycles: https://docs.rs-online.com/512f/0900766b8137f3b1.pdf
• https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/push-button-switches/1759621
Datasheet for that lists 1M cycles: https://docs.rs-online.com/4ef8/0900766b81680212.pdf
I can say without a doubt that I've had more touchscreens fail on me in my life than buttons. This is despite buttons being far more common for most of my lifespan.
For outsiders:
You’re move the map by turning your handlebar and riding in another direction. It automatically follows your position, heading and zooms in an out (depending on travel speed and upcoming turns). And routes are planned ahead of time on the computer (i. e. GPX) because you usually don’t want the shortest route between to points.
So the feature flyingcircus is mentions isn’t needed?
It is seldom needed. You can use it if a road is blocked to search the area for alternatives or looking for another riders current position (GroupTrack is awesome and complicated to setup) if far away.
The 840 (buttons + touch) solves that, for twice the price and is bigger/heavier. Or if you want avoid touch, more buttons :)
The old eTrex series feature a kind of TrackPoint serving as cursor-keys and enter-keys. I kept mine, because it shows many good design decisions (AA-Batteries, SD-Card, TrackPoint…) but of course it cannot compete with the Edge 530 (Turn-By-Turn Nav, Training-Status, Sensors, WiFi…).
An Edge with this kind of TrackPoint would be awesome.
Essentially, you are asking what the avionics industry is already doing. Just look at the cockpit of a plane.
As touch screens for applications started to become common, this naturally filtered into tactical and service work fields. There is an advantage in this as it allows a more compact interface that can change more easily based on what the user needs. However the down side is, in harsh fast paced environments where the user may be moving quickly and sweating, it's much harder to register intended user feedback to the interface.
The problem is not just if touch screens should be used, but also how they should be implemented. Especially on the side of general consumer electronics, like mobile phones, iOS and Android have built in interfaces for accessibility. In some cases you can get built in accessibility out of the box with very little effort, but the reality is, it takes a decent effort in most cases to get it right and users who need this behavior are not a heavy majority. This results in a deprioritization of accessibility in many mobile applications.
This gets much worse with more hardware centric devices like thermostats, ovens, refrigerators, etc which have a higher tendency to have user interfaces developed in house and lacking any accessibility. Compounding this problem, with the popularity of touch screen interfaces, and post COVID supply chain problems, many users who needed accessible functionally were (maybe still are) left without many options, likely either having to pay a heavy premium for something with usable accessibility features, but probably more realistically, just taking what they can get.
Modern technology makes accessibility easier than ever now, and enables accessibility in places that didn't previously exist, but the lack of willingness to implement accessible features on the part of some corporations is not just providing terrible accessibility, it's taking accessibility away from places where it previously existed.
I'm not at all opposed to technology but it should be superior to what it replaces.
There are laws forbidding us from touching our phones, but touching the embedded display is fair game? Bring back buttons, knobs and dials please. I shouldn't have to try to aim my finger at something intangible to change a setting while driving a ton of steel at 60mph.
Just knowing where the buttons are and feeling the surface of the buttons while I can keep my eyes and attention on the road is paramount.
Unrelated note, maybe Apple has this in mind when they implemented faceID...
They're anti-accesibility for one group and accessibility for another. I'm part of the latter group that struggles with tactile buttons for physical reasons. The former group may be bigger (no idea what the data looks like), but it's not black and white.
Never heard this about touchscreens not registering your touch when you get old. I guess my 83-year-old mother¹ and 92-year-old father aren’t old enough to experience this yet.
⸻
1. On the other hand, because her fingerprints have essentially vanished, my mother was never able to get touch ID to work.
Before that, I could text quicker on a t9 keypad than I can with the qwerty keyboard on a touch screen.
The feedback from tactile keys also means you don't have to constantly listen exclusively to the phone while operating it. I find it impossible to use Voiceover in a noisy environment or when someone is talking to me.
But here touch screens do make sense, because they are so easy to clean. I don't need them anywhere else though.
All of this, so that the display could actually provide location specific tactile feedback (unlike just the whole device shaking).
I always see my dishwasher having some bizarre setting active because of accidental contact with a touch button.
Bonus points for a big long click buffer and strange multi-click semantics so that once the computer unfreezes your attempts at diagnostics are redirected into messing up the state in weird and wonderful ways that you will have to unpack over the next week.
Bonus points if a firmware update changes the invisible control layout.
Dear Satan, I believe now would be a good time to discuss the subject of a raise!
This results in it getting opened while running all the time, and spraying water everywhere.
But at least the front panel is not made ugly by things like buttons and a LED!
So the entire front of the dishwasher is customizable and can't have any buttons/indicators.
We are semi-unhappy with ours. Our kids will open it to quickly grab a cup or bowl if nothing else is available, and forget to press the "Start" button to restart it. Our old washer would auto-restart after being opened. Oh, and the Start button needs to be pressed for more than a second, and there isn't really a tactile click when it succeeds. Which it doesn't always do. And if you press it twice it can reset and have to re-run the entire cycle.
Taking them off pauses your stuff. Sometimes that's useful, but on a desktop that's most often just annoying, particularly if you're just itching or adjusting them.
More mysterious is that tapping them also pauses, but not always, and not reliably enough to actually use to pause and unpause.
Even more mysterious though is the "two finger" tap which changes your headphones mode entirely, so that any background noise stops the noise cancellation. (It calls this "Conversation mode" or something).
But any background noise seems to cancel the noise cancellation, so it's less useful than just turning that off.
But this feature is easy to accidentally turn on, and it took a lot of googling in frustration to work out how to get it back to the normal operation.
God knows what other hidden features these things have, because who bothers to read the manual for a pair of headphones?
I'd be playing a game and say "Dammit" in response to something and my headphones would be like "OH! You're trying to have a conversation! Let me help you with that!"
Or I'd be on an airplane watching something funny, I'd laugh, and it'd disable the noise canceling.
This kind of automation is a bug, not a feature, as far as I'm concerned.
The fact you can get into that mode accidentally with no obvious way to cancel it is a UX failure.
http://web.archive.org/web/20210509153031/https://www.reddit...
Its like they see it, and be like "Ah, everyone who bought it got screwed over, and it will hurt our brand, but its still cheaper to quietly ignore it". Despisable
It's the same with designers doing their light-grey text on a white background with their 8K colour-perfect screen in optimal lighting conditions, and then when you point out this is difficult to read they go "I don't see the problem!"
Because the designers I’ve worked with would never ship that. But maybe I’ve just worked with competent designers.
- Neo4j docs: https://neo4j.com/docs/cypher-manual/current/introduction/cy...
- RabbitMQ docs (esp. that sidebar): https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/reliability
- Argo Workflows UI (no link, as you need to login).
- CV from "senior UX engineer" I received yesterday in response to a job ad I posted.
- Just now I found https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/ when searching for something else – the quote at the top is nigh-unreadable due to the "font-weight: 250" which has the same kind of effect as low-contrast grey text.
- I've also had some discussions with designers over the years. Some view their work as "art" and get incredibly defensive about even minor changes done for real pragmatic reasons. Of course, there are also plenty other more pragmatic and competent designers out there.
- HN does it for downvoted/dead comments and "text posts" such as ask/show HN. Dang said it's a feature. Many disagree.
It's not as prevalent as it once was – it was even worse 10 years ago – but it's still encountered fairly regularly.
Font weight is a crucial factor of readability, and it depends on screen specifics. On my 2020 M1 mbp at ~40% screen brightness, the NNGroup link quote is quite readable. As it is on my phone.
I don't rate any designer or developer very highly if they're too precious about their "art".
The HN dead/downvoted comments is contentious for sure. I don't agree with the choice fwiw.
It's all "readable" in the sense of "I can read it", but not in the sense of "I can read it effortlessly". I have a bit of CSS in Stylus to fix it, and it takes noticeably less effort to read it with a "normal" font. The RabbitMQ menu is just so much easier to scan as well with a more normal colour.
And agreed that readability is a scale and it’s best to be on the “easy” end of that scale.
They also love to disable the mouse scroll and the scrollbars, so the page has 300 more settings but you have no way of knowing that (this also happened to me on windows 11 btw).
It reached the point where I implemented my own script to bypass the GUI at work.
Two problems:
Buttons stopped working after warranty expired so had to pay for a service call to have it fixed. Luckily no parts were needed. I don't recall the reason right now.
It has a spinny disc, so like a potentiometer but not. It is a flat removable ring and behind it it uses a touch button of sorts
You have to pull it off amd clean it before every use for it to work and when it does work it is very fiddly to use.
I live with my 5 adult sons in a house with a small kitchen. Every hip-level surface gets smacked regularly.
I'm hopeful that the tide is turning on these designs as more people have to use them day to day and realize that touchscreens are categorically worse than tactile controls in a number of scenarios.
1. Place pot of water on element to boil
2. Enable boost mode
3. Water reaches boil as I'm distracted with other prep / child / HN post, and overflows
4. All controls (including ability to disable boost, reduce heat, or turn off element) rendered completely inoperable due to liquid on glass surface impacting pcap sensing
5. Dry, repeat.
My next cooktop will probably still be induction, but it will definitely have knobs.
My two gripes about induction are the touch controls they typically ship with and the inability to roast peppers over an open flame. But the incredible temperature response makes up for both IMO.
Solution: Immediately after cooking I walk over to the junction box and turn off the breaker to the stovetop.
My point is that it isn't always a design failure to use touch controls, sometimes it is an implementation failure that makes them unusable.
Some touch controls are incredibly good at filtering false inputs. Unfortunately you can't tell which.
the knobs on my manually operated range pull right off their posts and go soak in the sink with some soap and hot water once a week while i spray the range's control surface with whatever spray cleaner and wipe it off with every other flat surface in my kitchen.
after ten or fifteen minutes of soaking, anything left on the knobs fall off with a dry rag that goes in the cloth washer afterwards.
But I gotta say, the ability to just simply wipe the whole stove surface with a towel and be done has more than made up for the touch buttons sucking.
With physical knobs: Take knobs off and soak them, use a towel and wipe a circle around the nub that’s left, try not to leave a circular streak pattern, put knobs back. Or just wipe the knobs with the towel and get close enough on the surface.
Touch buttons: wipe the whole thing in big strokes, you’re done.
I clean the whole surface after every use now, because it’s just so damned easy.
What I really want is for the controls to not be on the cooking surface at all but that only seems to be available for stovetop + oven combinations which have their own annoying limitations.
Still bad design on many levels, but not quite what I would call a safety hazard for this reason alone.
Ideal would be to put the control surface further away from the cooking surface but that won't integrate into semi-standardized kitchen designs.
For medical reasons [1] I had to transition from the induction hob to a ceramic hob, and had to choose the Nef equivalent because it had the same physical footprint. So now I have the same crap controls with much worse response time to the control inputs themselves. The ceramic hob also can't detect when a pan has been removed so will leave a hob dangerously hot but not glowing. I've got used to it now but it is very frustrating and still catches me out sometimes.
[1] I have an implanted defibrillator whose sensor is nulled out by an inductions hob's magnetic fields.
Too bad you have no way of telling how good controls are in a product before you start using them.
It has two heating areas but maybe there's 4 area version.
This is a cool one with knobs that can be removed. Never used one, but I liked the idea.
https://media.s-bol.com/qn6AyQBAxA33/lYREMLg/1198x1200.jpg
(https://etna.nl/keukenapparatuur/fi590zwa/)
As I'll be remodelling the kitchen in any case, going to a stand-alone appliance is fine by me.
There are several models with knobs out there now. It seems to have been picked up as a premium feature.
Fortunately by last year the this Café (GE) double oven induction range was available here in the US: https://www.cafeappliances.com/appliance/Cafe-30-Smart-Slide... I have a few quibbles (mainly, that only one of the burners is properly sized for a 12" skillet) but overall I like it.
I don't mind the touch buttons for operating the oven and timers--in fact, they're nice and easy to clean (with a handy "lock screen" feature so you can spray and wipe down the front panel without everything going nuts) but I'm pretty sure trying to fine tune the burner settings using a touch slider while keeping an eye on multiple pans would have driven me nuts. I also have haven't had problems with the knobs getting dirty or being hard to wipe down if they do, to address a point raised in another reply.
Price splits the difference between the entry level ranges and the snobby brands (Miele, Thermador, etc).
The criteria of knobs on an induction oven filters out quite a lot of options annoyingly.
Well, and after years of searching, friends recommended me the AEG models, like IKE64450XB (here in Europe). And honestly, I was happy with the touch surface ever after: It reacts quickly enough and I can modify every flame at an instant. I don't even get a penny for this, I'm just satisfied. So, yeah, touch can be good, like on a smartphone, even on household devices.
On the other side, it's really hit or miss with these touch UIs: I also have an combined washing machine + dryer from the same brand and there I need to press each touch surface for at least half a second, and not touch the metal case of the machine, otherwise the touch wouldn't register. Then, the UI would sometimes hang, but still register touches, playing them back once it has caught up.
Recently changed offices at work. The new one has the same kind of buttons for the keypad. Just a flat surface with 9 numbers. I accidentally double press all the time, as it's hard to feel with no tactile feedback what you're doing and it's a bit delayed in the "beeps". So then you have to wait a few seconds and try again. Drives me mad.
This is not an EV thing. It's a contemporary trend, and it just happens that most newly designed cars are EVs now.
The rise of touchscreen technology was just coincidental with the rise of EVs. The first Tesla Roadster, Nissan Leaf, and Renault Zoe had crappy little screens, and real buttons for everything, like most cars of their era.
OTOH today EV-hating Toyota keeps making screens bigger. The latest Lamborghini has multiple touchscreens too.
This change would have happened even if EVs didn't exist. iPad is more to blame for that trend than an electric drivetrain.
Compare that to an actual screen where the button label and button position can change.
> I always see my dishwasher having some bizarre setting active because of accidental contact with a touch button.
My dishwasher has button to activate a control lock to prevent that. But the touch buttons suck so much and it requires a long press to activate that it always takes me two or three attempts and at least 10-15 seconds to push that button.
15 seconds for a button push, WTF were the designers thinking?
Innovators gonna innovate I guess.
Douglas Adams in 1979 knew the coming future:
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
It reminds me of what happened with the flat UI/anti-skeuomorphism wave a bit over a decade ago. It seemed like someone got so incensed by the faux leather in the iPhone's Find My Friends app (supposedly made to look like it had the same stitching as the leather upholstery in Steve Jobs' private jet) that they went on a crusade against anything "needlessly physical looking" in UI. We got the Metro design language from Microsoft as the fullest expression of it, with Apple somewhat following suit in iOS (but later walking back some things too) and later Google's Material Design walking it back a bit further (drop shadows making a big comeback).
But for a while there, it was genuinely hard to tell which bit of text was a label and which was a button, because it was all just bits of black or monocolor text floating on a flat white background. It's like whoever came up with the flat UI fad didn't realize how much hierarchy and structure was being conveyed by the lines, shadows and gradients that had suddenly gone out of vogue. All of a sudden we needed a ton of whitespace between elements to understand which worked together and which were unrelated. Which is ironic, because the whole thing started as a crusade against designers putting their own desire for artistic expression above their users' needs by wasting UI space on showing off their artistic skill with useless ornaments, but it led to designers putting their own philosophical purity above their users' needs, by wasting UI space on unnecessary whitespace and forcing low information density on everyone.
Really shows the power of UI designers at big organizations like Apple, Google, and Tesla.
I remember when Android (don't recall exactly which release) replaced their standard back, home and menu buttons with just a triangle, square and circle. It was so bizarre. I felt like a toddler playing with a "fit the blocks into the different shaped holes" toy.
I remember that around that time (I was quite young) I was putting it in all my attempts at websites (all hideous, even at the time) and I thought it looked really cool. Funny the way trends go.
In the case of the email it was clear that it just hadn't been updated with the times.
And the worst is, they're likely just copying competitors because as a sibling comment days, some people see the old accesible UI and think it looks old fashioned.
You also have to guess that the symbol is even there in the first place; in that new UI, many symbols are invisible until you hover over them.
Actionable items were indicated by a button, highlight, or underline (hyperlink!). A scrollbar showed you when there was more to see. There was consistency across all apps on a platform.
It took me a year of using Apple CarPlay to realize that if you touch the album of a song on the Now Playing part of Apple Music, it will bring you to that album's tracklist. Needless to say I felt very dumb upon discovering this so late, but I didn't feel at fault. Why?
Because when I touch the artist's name - it does nothing. When I touch the song title, it does nothing. When I touch the album art, it does nothing. All despite these having the same design style as the touchable album title. There is no reason to expect that the album title would be any different.
iOS, macOS, and Windows improved a lot, but the design is still horribly lacking in usability problems that were already solved decades ago.
So for a made-up example, GM wants to build a smart dash in the latest SUV, maybe Bosch or Continental has one with a SoC inside and their own software hell. OEM works with supplier to integrate, bugfix, skin, and customize. But they don't write it from scratch.
Toyota makes 10 million cars a year.
Another angle is that you can add/remove/relabel software buttons later. Hardware decisions are much more final.
Now replace all that with a single screen and suddenly costs savings everywhere \o/
Can you find any annual report from a car manufacturer that shows parts sales contributing significantly to profit?
Yes, dealerships make money from servicing and parts: "the service and parts department, which accounts for the other 49.6% of the dealership's gross profits".
But a car manufacturer doesn't capture that, so a manufacturer has no financial incentive to increase profits for dealerships.
ACDelco is an American automotive parts brand owned by General Motors
FYI Toyota owns an equivalent parts supplier called Denso.
The buttons still need to be programmed to do something so the cost savings isn't really on the software team.
Having a standard touchscreen that you can slap into any of your cars, and update OTA is huge.
The screen was going to be there anyways due to backup camera requirements and because consumers want AA/Carplay.
This. Backup camera requires a large screen leaving little room for buttons.
?????? A Chrysler Town & Country has a 6-ish inch screen and still easily runs a backup camera feed which is more than clear enough for anybody.
Adding a virtual button in an infotainment system is much cheaper than a physical button. Especially since the most cost effective routing of those physical buttons would be to the infotainment system that is going to be there regardless.
The interface is the problem, not the underlying information representation or communication.
If you want the car to be fully customer configurable, you basically need a custom dashboard for every single car. You also need to think about what happens when the customer does an upgrade.
Not necessarily. Sony has joysticks that can snap in and out of the advanced controllers. It wouldn't be hard at all to design a backing circuit board that supports this behind the trim. Switches aren't exactly delicate parts either so it's conceivable that a cheaper system could use auto shops to solder in a new switch into the board.
You could also have a simple multiplexed interface board near the head unit and the switches could use simple two wire connections back to that board. Or the head unit could just have this built into it. Or you could design and use a HID like protocol so different interface adapters with different capabilities could be plugged and unplugged from the system.
Is this worth the cost? Short term probably not but long term you might be able to make these accessories much more generic and so reusing them in newer designs might actually lead to good savings. Plus you'd spawn an active third party market for these parts.
There is a cool idea called open source, but I suppose something as radical as giving users ownership of software for their car isn't something companies would be willing to consider. Much better when you get to charge a subscription for heated seats.
I have a 2017 Chevy Sonic with a built in touchscreen and I basically never have to touch it other than to input an address into Android auto.
I haven't found any pieces of the car functionality I cannot access through a button somewhere on the dash or steering wheel
I doubt a 2024 car has that much more functionality than my 2017
My rule of thumb is if it's on the center console I shouldn't be messing with it when the car is in motion. If I'm supposed to mess with it while moving it's on the wheel or immediately around it.
And tbh between my car with a zillion buttons I shouldn't be pressing while driving and a small screen and the car where most of those functions I shouldn't mess with while driving are on the screen I prefer the screen. Far bigger screen to quickly glance at the maps when driving instead of a smaller one that's harder to see. Less space to actually see the media collection when I'm stopped and can safely navigate it.
That's on the steering wheel on practically every car I've had for over 20 years of model years.
You probably shouldn't be flipping between audio sources while driving. But even then, I've had change audio source as an option on steering wheels before. Generally, you shouldn't be fiddling with the radio when the vehicle is moving, you should be driving. Keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road, not on the stereo in the center console.
FWIW, in pretty much every car I've had since a 2012 model year I've been able to press a button on the wheel and say "tune to am 1510" and it'll tune that without having to take my hands or eyes off the wheel. Far preferrable than trying to look over at the radio to find the AM button again and figure out which knob is the tuning dial and then look to see I'm tuning to the right station.
Every time I try to talk to the voice assistant its the most horrible driving experience. It hijacks everything, and definitely sets me to where I have to pull over, or just stop trying to talk to it to get anything done. It does not understand me whatsoever.
Every UI using "simple" menu button navigation has been horrific in my experience. Remote controls, handsets, TV configuration menus, yadda yadda.
Last time I had something useful was in my Volvo 740. After that it has been getting worse and worse. Even physical nobs can be bad, just round and smooth, without any physical notch that snows what direction it points.
But there are so many settings on a contemporary car that it would be impractical to have a switch for all of them, and even if they were, if it's something you'd like to change once in a blue-moon being able to search for that setting is really useful.
I don't know if this makes great sense as an example, but, say you're travelling from the UK to France (or USA to Mexico?) and want to have your speedometer show km/h rather than miles/hour. That's not a setting which should have a switch, but may be something useful.
Three presses in a Mercedes on its speedometer screen.
> speedometer screen
> screen
So a setting behind a screen instead of a dedicated hardware button/switch/toggle for it.
I don't see why in God's name would you ever need that as a hardware switch.
And then on top of that people want AA/CarPlay which is designed around touch inputs first, so you're going to have that screen be touch anyways.
None of that should really be changed by the driver when the car is in motion, and you'd have to manage the deep navigation of a bunch of button presses on a screen anyways so arguing you'd be less distracted is a moot point.
Sadly all other GPS navigators we used to use has gone downhill to the state of unusable so this is what we turned out using all vacation.
If I was making such an interface, that would be a dial or knob instead of buttons.
I've had far more rotary encoders fail than I've had capacitive screens fail, so even an argument of higher reliability is pretty moot. Most damage that would break the capacitive touch is going to damage the rest of the screen anyways.
Finally, if it's so I can change those settings while wearing gloves, wow I'm going to increase the complexity of the car and take up more space so I can change the settings on the secondary keys without taking off my gloves when it's really cold outside someday. So much stuff just so I can do that thing I rarely do anyways slightly easier for a few days of the year, assuming I'm changing those settings while also getting in and out of the car a lot so I wouldn't want to take off my gloves for a minute.
Just put the settings behind a touchscreen. It's fine.
That doesn't sound like a dial/knob. You'd give it a single big twist or scroll to get the cursor around the right spot first. Same as old-fashioned radios.
At least with an old-fashioned radio knob you got the feedback of if you were tuning into the station by hearing it. But moving a selector on a screen?
It's like you're arguing for the MacBook Wheel, as if a knob is the most optimal way to input arbitrary choices on a computer.
[F1] FOO
[F3] BAR
[F5] BAZ
[F7] BAL
[F1] Index
[F3] Threads
[F5] Comments
[F7] More [F1] Ask
[F3] Show
[F5] Jobs
[F7] More [F1] Profile [F1] View
[F3] Submissions
[F5] Logout
[F3] New
[F5] Past
[F7] Submit
(The use of odd numbers wasn't even optimal)
On this feature (which itself can be enabled/disabled), sometimes you can choose how far back it'll move the seat automatically for you.
Its this setting that you're suggesting you're going to mess with enough to have decent muscle memory to change without looking. That you'd want as a top-level feature setting option, practically a dedicated button to change it.
The video below shows what I'm talking about. Note in a lot of cars it's just a basic toggle. Sometimes you can set how far back you want the seat to go, if you want the steering wheel to move, how far you want the steering wheel to move, etc.
We only need knobs for crucial things like fog lights, turn signals and skipping podcast ads.
> I haven't found any pieces of the car functionality
Any functionality.
I agree though. Any critical driving function should be physical. Like the podcast ad skip button on the steering wheel, one of the most important control components in a modern car.
I'm talking about important, everyday functions of a vehicle, like the radio, GPS, heating, cruise control, etc
GPS? As in you're going to have like a whole QWERTY keyboard as physical keys or something for punching in addresses? I've got no problem with practically everything about the navigation be on a touchscreen, I shouldn't be messing with it while the car is moving. Just make it big.
Radio/stereo should have physical controls on the steering wheel. You shouldn't really be messing with the center console while driving. It's not like you should be swapping CD's or navigating folders on the USB drive or whatever. Anything past next/previous and volume is probably too much.
Cruise control should be on the steering wheel or stalks as well.
It's 2024. Thermostats have been a thing for a long time. Cars can make us comfortable without having to mess with the settings every five minutes. Every time I'm in a car that doesn't have auto climate I hate it, have to constantly futz with it to make it actually comfortable. Meanwhile even my 2000 Accord had a decent auto climate that I practically never had to touch. But whatever, put the basic AC controls and what not as physical controls. The only one I care to absolutely be physical is max defrost.
But my point is, there are a ton of controls you're possibly going to use sometimes, even if only to originally set up the car how you want it. It's asinine thinking every function of a modern car can have some physical switch and toggle to it. Loads of cars would look like the controls on the Space Shuttle if you forced every feature available to be assigned to a physical switch.
The functionality you refer to is probably the creature comforts (ie, multi zone A/C, memory settings for front seats, …). But the essentials of a car (ie, transmission, wheels, structural integrity, windshield wipers) haven’t changed for decades.
What has changed though is:
- increasing size of vehicles due to increasing insecurity of American buyers
- a large majority of class C holders largely unprepared for the size of these vehicles
- this gives manufacturers the opportunity to stuff as much tech junk into these vehicles to give these less qualified drivers more assistance
- coincidentally, all of this tech junk comes with a very high premium for manufacturers and dealerships
Fear sells in this country. 9/11 changed the game.
I understand the average vehicle size increased to exploit a loophole in emission reduction requirements.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popu...
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-E9B387D...
Designs for structural integrity are also different. Look at a 1997 Honda Accord and how big its windows are and how skinny those pillars are. Look at a modern Accord and see how big its pillars are. Look at a crash test of a 2000s Town and Country and compare that to a modern Pacifica. Radically different.
AFAIK, an airliner cockpit also hides the "long tail" of functionality behind multi-function screens (though AFAIK they use physical multi-function buttons and keyboards, instead of touch screens); only the essential functions have physical buttons (but there are a lot of essential functions on an airplane).
With the regrettable exception of the couple of climate controls I detail below, the only functionality on the touch screen is stuff I shouldn't be fiddling with while in motion anyway: GPS, car settings, and anything that CarPlay displays. I know a Civic isn't a prime example of a "high tech" car, but it's a well-specced one and I'm struggling to think of much that substantially fancier cars have that would blow past a reasonable limit for physical controls.
† on/off, temp, screen blower, seat heaters, and defrosters all have physical controls. The manual fan speed and direction controls are on the touch screen. I wish they weren't, and I believe the newer 11th gen has restored these as physical knobs and buttons.
I wound up getting a new 11th gen Civic since used cars were ridiculously expensive at the time, and I was very pleased to find that the touchscreen is only used for iOS/Android and some settings. The climate control knobs are imperfect though: for some reason they decided that the user should select which vents are active with an infinitely scrolling knob, so you can't utilize muscle memory, and you have to look at it while you're turning it. An improvement over the previous generation, but a step down from my dad's 1992 Civic.
The thing is I intuitively know about 50 of them since I’ve been driving the vehicle about six months now.
Of course it still has a touch screen display for all the usual carplay/android auto shenanigans.
One of my newer cars has only one physical control and that’s for volume. I never realized it before owning this car but I change the AC much more frequently than I change my audio volume.
My 95B.2 Macan: "Hold my bier and watch this..."
(Naturally, many of the 90+ buttons were gone with the next facelift, which is why the old one is still in my garage.)
I'm not saying it never happens, but it would be an exceptional outlier circumstance.
I know a guy who worked at GM and apparently they got bit by the “digital transformation” bug and decided that the army of iPhone app developers and ex Silicon Valley folks was what they needed to stay relevant. Hence the omnipresent touch screen.
Also this is a safety problem. IMO, this should be regulated. In the US we kind of do - we require a physical button for the hazard lights. That's why in modern Teslas that's the only physical button.
Fast forward a decade, and now buyers want buttons.
On another note, I do like my (getting older) Mazda's screen. It has touch, but I honestly forget it does because the control knob is so much better for use while driving. Nice and tactile. Additionally all of the important controls have physical buttons. Only major problem I have with it is that if it can't connect to Bluetooth (which is stupidly often), it decides to switch back to radio, blasting that at me. Then I have to sit there going through multiple menus to get Bluetooth reconnected.
CVTs work by a "belt" riding on "cones". These cones can slide in and out and change the size of each side, meaning they can change their gear ratio dynamically. This is great in many ways: the vehicle can always get exactly the gearing it wants for a given situation and there's no shift lag or shudder or whatever. Just nice, smooth, continuous adjustment of the gear ratio.
However, that belt riding on the cones depends on a good bit of friction to work. Friction means wear and tear. For a car level CVT, they make it out of a lot of little metal wedges on a metal band instead of what you'd normally think of a belt. However, it'll still constantly wear out leaving lots of tiny metal shavings. Owners are typically pretty bad about actually maintaining their cars, so transmission fluids and belt replacements often go long or skipped entirely leading to early deaths for these transmissions. Plus, you typically can't put as much power through them without risking damage.
They probably mean a real transmission as in one with actual interlocking gears whether that be automatic or manual.
They totally knew.
But they went too far and moved everything to the screens. It's fine for big portion of the controls, but it's a big no-no for the controls you need to use while driving. And that's just a few buttons, to be honest.
Anyway, a decent design process would figure out. Seems like inner politics won instead.
The combination of a screen AND buttons is still more expensive than just a screen. If you are introducing a new component that is going to otherwise raise the cost of production, you will be looking for ways to reduce cost or, maybe more aptly, offset the cost of the new component.
With touch screens, you are presented with a unique option where the thing you introduce can be used to move all sorts of functionality to that would otherwise need its own hardware.
You also need to keep in mind that the physical buttons on older cars didn't need to be tied into a computer system as much as modern buttons.
> Seems like inner politics won instead.
Yeah, that's exactly my point.
This was an intentional design choice from Mazda, of course, that goes hand-in-hand with their philosophy of giving such control to the driver that they "[feel] oneness with the car, as if it is an extension of their body." [1]
When searching around for a quote like that, I found a HN discussion from 2019 about the Mazda decision to eliminate touchscreens. [2]
[1] https://www.mazdausa.com/discover/human-centric-design-puts-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335
I don't know about the other makes you mention, but with my 2022 Subaru Crosstrek I turn on defrost with a physical button.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/pwfmy4/how_to_...
That a Reddit thread like this exists is crazy.
So here is another Reddit thread about the car itself: https://old.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/rpeemn/after_f...
Apparently, I will buy a used Mazda someday.
I actually wanted that Mazda, which takes the same idea to the max, but I couldn't justify the cost difference just for the buttons (it also looks way cooler than the Ford of course, but ok). The Ford strikes a decent balance IMO - besides the 100% buttonized HVAC, it has a touch screen for all the touchy navigationy carplay-y stuff, but eg volume control and map zoom have physical dials and play/pause/skip all have physical buttons too.
My wife and me disqualified most other brands purely for this reason. We'd open marketing sites and skip through the promo photos until we saw a picture of the dashboard. No buttons? Close tab. I love that apparently more brands are now figuring out that "ipad on wheels" designs drive people away.
I think it was Norman Nielson thing or one of those old school gurus.
How are people allowed to work on UIs without learning the core syllabus? The basics of their trade? I grew up on this stuff and I'm not even a UX specialist or a UI designer.
Or are they getting overridden by bad product managers and other shitty stakeholders?
I develop and rely on muscle memory when driving, and I'm not going to invest in muscle memory that can be changed out from under me on the whims of some product manager somewhere.
I certainly never got my brain round them.
;-)
I would buy a tesla instantly if you gave me a eurorack dashboard insert!
eurorack module designers have moved hardware interface design to where they can create intuitive design languages as well.
Ralph Nader in 1967, 57 years ago, interviewed by Studs Terkel:
<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-...>
Direct audio: <https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.m...> (MP3)
(The segment is excellent, and whilst in many ways a historical document also strongly informs the recent past, immediate present, and I strongly suspect the future.)
The AWS back-end could be browsed or downloaded directly via AWS tools a ways back, and was about 600 GB last I'd checked. You'll have to sort out your own directory of content, however. Much of what's in there still isn't included in the official directory, again, at last check, though that includes numerous fragments and partial-tape interviews.
<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/>
(Previous discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39628701>.)
I wish world would work like this. Unfortunately it does not.
Why would you want the most used features to be on a touchscreen?
Gear change: drive/park/reverse. Always using when stopped.
Music: has physical control to change + voice
Volume: same
Side mirrors folks: same + auto
Climate: profile + voice The only thing that I found I need to fiddle with touchscreen (one physical button -> one touch button) while driving is rear fog light. It's neither auto nor supported by voice.
It's an easy software fix; not sure why they didn't add it yet. The software even recognizes the command and says not available yet.
Trying to legislate exactly what is and isn't in cars is exactly how we got touch screen everything in the first place.
I have less than zero faith that doubling down and adding another layer on top will not cause more perverse 2nd and 3rd order consequences.
Even for certain audio controls it makes no sense. My (fairly old now) Toyota's touch screen is needed for switch between radio and usb (no carplay/android auto), even thats annoying to use.
why would you want to select your gear on the touchscreen?
I wonder how many sales they lose on the new models because the turn signal stalks are gone? (all stalks)
I hate hate hate non-analog controls in cars.
I finally figured out two ways to lock the car, but it took a bunch of web searches to get it.
On the other hand, some cars are destined for fleets, and all may need to be operated by a stranger in an emergency. There should be a common configuration for features related to safety and velocity.
Works well enough though ... you wouldn't have to press it that often if auto-wipers just worked. Unfortunately, that may be the worst Tesla feature right now since their autowipers love activating for no reason on a dry day, or over-activating in rain.
I could criticize your coworker for driving a vehicle off into nature and dangerous weather conditions without taking a few moments to learn how to operate its most basic functions. But I don’t need to, because all I really need to point out is that they could’ve just clicked the button on the turn stalk to turn on the wipers. No touchscreen needed.
In all seriousness, though, they need to be a more careful driver. Driving a vehicle without knowing how to drive it is the fault of the driver and puts other people in danger.
Maybe telsa should switch the brake pedal and the accelerator next.
Maybe cocacola should switch which way you twist the bottle cap to get it off? Surely it is the user’s fault if they cannot open the bottle.
2. Taking a few moments to learn to click a button in a car you bought is far from unreasonable, especially when everyone knows going in that a Tesla is not a completely standardized vehicle. The risk posed by this change is orders of magnitude less than the risk imposed by swapping the brake and accelerator pedals, so that is far from a fair or reasonable comparison.
3. You may not appreciate the benefits of the changes that Tesla made, as these things are ultimately subjective, but those changes contributed to the Model Y becoming the best selling vehicle on the planet.
Now, if your coworker had rented a car and unexpectedly received a Tesla, I could sympathize more. A car rental company should not rent out non-standard vehicles unexpectedly. However, it’s always the responsibility of the driver to learn to operate the vehicle first before getting on the road and endangering others.
Yet I can switch between very different cars and "it just works" and I dont' have to go through the darn manual each time... weird inni't?
> 3. You may not appreciate the benefits of the changes that Tesla made, as these things are ultimately subjective, but those changes contributed to the Model Y becoming the best selling vehicle on the planet.
_Something something correlation something something causation_
Have you considered that Tesla mayb got to that point because it was 1) very efficient and 2) Musk has a cult-like following (something akin Apple users making pointless decissions) even DESPITE dumb solution like tablet stuck in the middle of the dashboard or stupid changes like this one?
You are with a friend, and they are not feeling well, with most cars you can just take the wheel and drive as long as needed without having to look at the manual to figure out how to operate basic safety features.
I don't hate Elon, neither I hate Tesla, but I don't fucking want an "opinionated" car. Those changes bring no benefit other than saving a few minutes of assembly time and a few parts on the Bill of Materials, and all those benefits are for Tesla, not for me as a customer or a driver.
btw, the whole manual, with search option, is in the tablet.
* The owners silently put up with inconveniences. I don't know why the majority of people browse the web without adblockers but if they can put up with that, they can put up with bad car UX
* Sunk cost fallacy
* Fanboys, which very much will put in more effort to make something work than your average person would
I think I've got a driver's license that allows me to drive from Toyotas to VW, from Dodges to BYD without having to read the manual for basic usage.
And yes, I usually do read the manual even on rented cars, but not because I need to figure out how to operate the turn signals or windshield wipers.
If Tesla wants do things their way, we should do like an aviation and require type certification as we do for pilots to be able to operate more complex planes. Let'see how Tesla's marketing would like this.
BS. The only reason this example is dangerous is because the manufacturer changed things for no reason -- things that were working just fine.
See also the death of Anton Yelchin, which occurred because some "UX designer" was bored with the way gearshifts had worked since his or her grandmother learned to drive: https://www.cochranfirm.com/washington-dc/star-trek-actor-ki...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2023/09/08/tesla...
Even outside of that, one of the most basic things any driver in a new car should do is familiarize themselves with standard controls (wipers, defrost, backup camera, turn signals, etc) before shifting into drive.
Sounds like your friends were danger to themselves and others on the road.
Thankfully, Japanese and Korean cars still have ergonomics. Hope they stay that way.
Physical buttons to answer and disconnect a phone call, to mute the speaker (whenever ads popup on Spotify or YouTube say), to disable camera and microphone when you absolutely don't want to risk it (attending an office meeting while sitting on the toilet), etc. Without any dependency on screen being clean and registering touch properly or OS not being laggy at the wrong time.
This is an important difference over cars, where you don't buy the car for the joy of its computing behavior. You buy the car for transportation and any computing distraction from this could prevent the sale entirely.
SmartKnob - Haptic input knob with software-defined endstops and virtual detents
https://github.com/scottbez1/smartknob https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37448659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30646886
I am really hoping this and similar projects take off and find mass success -- and tactile controls become more widely deployed across all devices for human-input.
Funnily enough I recall using something less cool looking in a BMW 5 series from almost 20 years ago. The knob would stop rotating at the end of menu lists on screen when you could scroll no further.
It made sense, but I recall it being so novel that I spent more time trying to make it NOT move than actually just using the menu system.
BMW stopped using it for some reason.
source: http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/index.html#g...
Oh and real indicator stalks, that would be nice too.
> The S3XY Knob comes with a Gen2 Commander, which adds unique automation to your Tesla, such as automatically restarting your Autopilot after a lane change and turning off the wipers during AP drives. [emphasis added]
At what point should a company that builds products like that be liable for the damages they encourage?
For that matter, reckless endangerment and involuntary manslaughter are crimes in many jurisdictions.
Yeah but good luck actually getting someone charged and convicted for these when a motor vehicle is involved.
IMO that should be the law.
They did away with all the stalks. The car guesses which direction you want to drive. Turn signals are buttons on the (rotating) steering wheel (or yoke).
The worst is that the touchscreen has very tiny targets. There's nowhere to rest your hands, you have to stab at them from the driver's seat (in a moving car) sigh.
Tangentially: the Tesla single giant glass console is in dire need of a UX designer to take the clutter out and make it far more usable. It’s here I wish that Apple had bought Tesla many many years ago: CarPlay as they have it now where it takes over the whole screen would have been amazing.
Dials and switches can be fully digital (e.g., dials can be free-spinning, without locks at each end of a setting). So preferring dials and switches seems reasonable. But flaps for vents are very difficult to automate. Returning to manual flaps in cars would mean losing modern cars' ability to associate and restore HVAC vent preferences with driver profiles. It would mean returning to the time when it was actually necessary to adjust the HVAC vents every time you swapped drivers. While setting vent preferences on the screen may take a second or two longer than manually setting them, thanks to the setting being associated with my driver profile, it's a set-once-and-forget-forever setting. The net time and annoyance savings is large.
I would much rather retain the ability to quickly change temp or re-orient a blower without taking my eyes off the road than for the car to remember that I like it cool and breezy and she likes it like a furnace.
Why? If I'm correctly understanding what you're saying here:
> While setting vent preferences on the screen may take a second or two longer than manually setting them, thanks to the setting being associated with my driver profile, it's a set-once-and-forget-forever setting.
it sounds like vent position is already computer-controlled. Do I misunderstand?
So, take the "move the vent up, down, left, right, more open, more shut" controls that you indicate exist on the touchscreen and wire them up to sensibly-positioned freewheeling/non-stop/whatever wheels that have lights embedded in them to indicate the actual position of the controlled aspect of the vent. [EDIT: For bonus points, you could use force-feedback motors in the wheels to indicate when you've hit the edge of travel for the controlled vent aspect. (Assuming that Sony doesn't hold a PS5-era bad patent on force-feedback tech.)]
What am I missing?
lol. I think tesla was copying apple, relentlessly removing without knowing when to stop.
Apple has lost its way too in this respect.
(and Tesla actually relented twice on the s/x - yoke horn button, plus added back a round steering wheel option)
It can't come a bit too soon. My oven has buttons that aren't actually raised from their surroundings, and presses are registered via some sort of presumably fancy processing that I guess sounded slick when it was being pitched, but in practice means that it's very, very difficult to be confident that a button press will do anything, especially when fingers are greasy from cooking.
Oh, and sometimes whatever processor it's using gets frozen up, so I have to turn it off and back on again. But, since it's hardwired, this involves toggling a fuse. I'm sure that there are many ways that this is a better oven than the one in the many-decades-old apartment where I used to live, but I never had to re-boot that oven.
I'm pretty sure that capacitive touch sensing is just cheaper than physical interfaces, it's more to do with corner cutting than being slick. All you need to create a capsense "button" is some traces on a PCB, they're essentially free if you're making a PCB anyway.
That makes sense. Thanks!
It seems like a no brainer to show the error code w/ a description. Though that might decrease the number of dealer visits compared to a non-descriptive check engine light.
I don’t know enough about it to know if or how any manufacturers solve that—maybe it’s something that you can manually reset when rotating tires? My car is a 2016 so I’m in the same boat and stuck with a blanket “low pressure” warning.
It's not too difficult for the car to know which TPMS chirp relates to which tire.
I have the WH-1000XM2s and they do not have volume or pause buttons. Double tap to pause, slide up and down for volume. I can't comment on them compared to yours, but the touch element works extremely well on them.
The most annoying part is there are some buttons already on the phones for connectivity so the could have added more for basic functions.
* Sony's naming scheme sucks. I will never remember the product names and the name difference between the headphones and earbuds
* the WM earbuds also have a bonus feature where there really isnt any way to turn them off other than to put them in the case, so they go through battery-destroying 80-100% charge cycles and last like 1-2 years before the batteries are at half capacity.
With my old car, I could keep CarPay navigation on the large touchscreen while I could simultaneously turn on the seat heater and adjust the temperature by blindly hitting the physical controls. In my new car, I literally have to press the screen to bring up the HVAC UI which then overrides CarPlay (and thus hides my navigation). This is completely insane to me.
Also the touchscreens break muscle memory habits and don't give any feedback. These things are actually extremely important f.ex. in a car.
Other than that, I really don't care. When I'm punching in the address on the navigation system, give me a massive screen. When I'm stopped and trying to look up something in my media collection, give me a massive touchscreen. When I'm trying to quickly glance at the map, make it a giant screen so I can see it all quickly. Or better yet a HUD or have it on the instrument cluster.
Less optimization results in more accidents, injuries, and deaths.
FSD is a very small step above adaptive cruise control. It's more of a novelty than anything. I certainly wouldn't trust using it, and I don't really care what numbers say either. Tesla doesn't really play fair, being deceptive is a core part of their business. It's no surprise then that FSD auto shuts off right before accidents. We actually have no idea how safe it is, and I'm not going to be listening to what the guy selling them has to say.
"FSD is a very small step above adaptive cruise control"
Yeah right
As for my car, that's the only touch interface; all else is old school tactile button and knobs.
I am starting to wonder how drivers of the modern teslas and similar feel about all touch interface in their cars.
It's just that touchscreens have been the least bad option, when you really need/want (always arguable, of course) to iterate a lot on the software, that is inside an expensive and not cheaply/easily modifiable piece of hardware.
Why do you do that? I find that it barely impacts my driving experience, and it's an easy way to decrease emissions.
(I don't often drive at rush hour, so often I might just stop at a light for literally 1 or 2 seconds whilst it notices I'm there and then switches over to green, or maybe I've timed it almost right to slow down gradually to the lights and only have to stop for a short time at the end.)
I don't know anything but I have been wondering if it might actually be worse for emissions and engine wear for the auto to cut off only for 1 or 2 seconds each time.
I can see the appeal in traffic with longer waits though?
Its easy to say it was for profit. But surely they cant be that bad at the math of frustrating their audience versus saving pennies.
I've similarly seen car companies doubling down on obviously hated design decisions for 10 years when it could be fixed with a refresh in 3. As if they have pride and spite rather than wanting to make money.
I have a feeling the core issue is companies do not have any interest in oversight of their designers and their designers are unhinged.
As a gamer, for me there is no more crystalized example of "Everything doesn't need to be touchscreen-based!" than comparing the excellent Gameboy Advance Game, "WarioWare Inc" to its touch-based sequel on the Nintendo DS, "WarioWare: Touched". Some of the same minigames that were previously driven by d-pad and buttons were now entirely driven by the touchscreen and stylus, and were much worse off for it.
Given that WarioWare: Touched! was released in 2005, it's a little depressing that it took the rest of the tech industry almost 20 years to learn from that mistake.
> A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
Multi-function display - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-function_display « a small-screen (CRT or LCD) surrounded by multiple soft keys (configurable buttons) that can be used to display information to the user in numerous configurable ways. »
I’d like a Thrustmaster Cougar MFD with USB interface on a flat panel screen, perhaps with both illuminated soft buttons and knobs with labels on screen. I wonder why they don’t sell one with a built in screen? There’s lots of DIY builds that add them.
Something must be wrong with me. This sentence would sound so lame to the average person and yet it sounds fascinating to me. I wish I had the title of "the leading expert on buttons."
I really LOVE how the WHOLE article is about BUTTONS BUTTONS BUTTONS. It really clears any doubt about her expertise. It's not an exaggeration. It's an actual leading expert on buttons!
>The blind community had to fight for years to make touchscreens more accessible. It’s always been funny to me that we call them touchscreens. We think about them as a touch modality, but a touchscreen prioritizes the visual.
Really interesting observation. In order to press virtual buttons, you have to look at the screen to figure out whether the button is (unless it's a full-width button at the bottom). Physical buttons generally don't require this in order to be pushed. They may still require this if the action the button performs depends on a state that is indicated by a screen, e.g. a menu where you have directional buttons to change the selected item.
https://youtu.be/7R0CViDUBFs?t=429
Moment I question is at 7:09, but whole vid is quite interesting.
There is the consideration of what buttons to have. I think that for many kind of devices, numeric keypads will be useful. This can include the time and power of microwaves, frequency of radios, telephone numbers, date/time to schedule something, numbered menu items, etc. Stuff such as CD and DVD players and VCRs might also have controls such as play, pause, stop, rewind, fast-forward, record, previous-track, next-track, etc. Anything with audio will also have high volume, low volume, and mute (use a dial might be used to control volume instead, on some devices).
Additionally, a remote control should not be required. The controls should be directly on the device itself, although remote controls (e.g. with IR) might also be available.
You can't do this with a touch screen. There is no indication of surface or depth of feedback. True that you can have a "bump" feedback, but that is for basically ever "button" on the touchscreen so they all feel the same.
There is nothing to distinguish one button "area" from the other on a touchscreen. Now this isn't a big deal if you can look at the control, but what about blind people, trying to navigate in the dark or even worst... while driving???
Touchscreens have their place but they don't need to replace everything.
On the other hand, I find it unnatural to have physical buttons on a tablet. My brain takes a moment to adjust to the fact that the volume up and volume down buttons on the iPad reverse their behavior based on the device’s orientation. I would also prefer if fingerprint detection on the iPad were integrated into the display, as seen in some Samsung phones.
Buttons with a screen you have to look at are no better than a touchscreen. For cars, everything important should be do-able without looking. At least until Waymo's technology filters down to most cars.
The problem is feature creep where they want user to have so many functions that they have no choice but to use buttons and detailed graphics.
I think if the smallest buttons they used occupied at least quarter of the screen and if screen would have corners that you can physically grab onto when you are pressing they could be mostly fine-ish.
UX designers that design console experiences for visually impaired people would be the best people to create UI for cars. Although still not perfect.
You're saying the analog functionality behind a button, like an analog volume control is no longer a pontiometer, but rather a tactile UI element?
I've read a bunch of history of computers and related technology, and I've never seen that. Where can I find it? (I don't doubt it; I want to read it!)
It shouldn't surprise me: The telegraph made immediate, cost-effective wide-area communication possible, and of course people then weren't idiots (or we're not so smart) - some of them imagined future development and applications.
You know what I love?
Physical controls for heat/radio/shifting etc.
It feels precise and tactile.
My wife refuses to drive it, she much prefers the modern luxuries in cars, but there is something so satisfying about FEELING the interaction with a control.
Or maybe go the other direction and hope that new Scout isn't just a fantasy. Even with the physical controls and generator, I hate that it will surely be fully computer operated and all by software I can't access or control at all. It will surely be nice physical controls and a pile of annoying wrong behaviors you can't fix.
"All new cars in US now required to have backup cameras" (2018)
<https://abcnews.go.com/US/cars-us-now-required-backup-camera...>
I can appreciate the safety rationale. I hate what this does to automobile interiors / controls, and suspect that the distraction / confusion factor may very well outweigh any possible life/injury savings due to the cameras in the first place. The alternative of incorporating the BUC display into the rear-view mirror, perhaps in addition to obstacle warnings, might be an alternative.
Absent that, a fold-down ceiling-mounted display would be my next preference. Anything to avoid having a persistent screen on the dash.
Mazda were apparently offering a heads-up display (HUD) as of 2019: <https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...>
(As noted elsewhere in thread by slipmagic: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42037412>.)
It's fine to bury options / settings that you don't touch often, or ever, under a menu.
When driving, the steering wheel controls to change the audio / autopilot speed are "good enough."
What's missing?
I should be able to adjust the wiper speed with a dial on the stalk. (The automatic wipers are lousy, and if there was a dial on the stalk, I really wouldn't care.)
I should be able to adjust the heated seat with a dial, and maybe adjust the climate control temperature with a dial.
That's it. Just a few more buttons.
Buttons shouldn't have context when you aren't looking at them.
Voice control seems the obvious solution but there are probably better ideas, especially as someone who's accent confuses all but the best recognition, or well trained, software. I end up talking in an "American" accent to my car ... but then I do enjoy pretending I'm Michael Knight.
That said, I am appreciative of people coming to their senses over this. Maybe not every car maker thought this out as much.
"Every firing officer in every Patrol ship touched his stud in the same split second." -- First Lensman
"before a firing-stud could be pressed, the enemy craft almost disappeared again",
"The Boskonian touched a stud and spoke." -- Gray Lensman
I once had the opportunity to tour a US railroad switch tower, likely dating to the 1930s if not before. As with much other industrial architecture, something most people may not realise is the extent to which the form of the structure is dictated by not only human requirements (elevated position to have an overview of the yard) but the technical mechanism itself.
The upper portion of the tower is dominated not only by the observation windows, but by a vast number of physical rods which control individual sets of points (track switches). The levers don't move the rails directly, but they do directly move the electro-mechanical activators in the tower base, from which rods or cables (I believe it's rods, I'm not positive however) make a continuous physical connection to each controlled set of points. That is, there is not a separate actuator at the points themselves.
(More modern switching systems, or even other older ones, may well have this. The tower I observed most certainly did not.)
I've also had an interest for some years in how the artefacts of control influence the language of control. We speak of the reins or levers of power in most European languages, reflecting older sources or projections of power; modern terms seem to have been slower to be adopted though some ("dynamo" and "engine") are extant. I've long suspected that the Chinese, with a millennia-long history of hydrologic civil engineering projects might have a language of power which borrows from water control structures (dams, gates, levees, bridges, etc.). Some time afterward I realised that Latin certainly does, and retains at least one descriptor in pontifex maximus, that is, "bridge builder in chief*, first applied to Rome's emperors, now its Pope. And I've very recently learnt that Vietnamese language and culture have many words with shared roots in water, including the word for "mother".
Asking because I want to duplicate the look of an OEM vehicle setup for a personal project.
"Guy Who Stares at Vehicle Buttons"
Maybe it's just my bad luck but touchscreens always break.
Thankfully, for a lot of them I only need to use my phone to either show them a QR code or to open the locker from the app.
For cost cutting it might be going according to plan: Tesla is making a good profit on their cars.
The success of their automation efforts remains to be seen.
Say I own one for 15+ years, what happens when the firmware is outdated?
The firmware being outdated wouldn't be more of an issue than with any other head unit if they weren't internet connectable on top of being so integrated. I'm afraid someone has hard coded some service SSID to autoconnect to, and once the signing keys are cracked, that's all someone would have to do to push a compromised update.
I've made it a point never to own a vehicle that can accept OTA updates or that has always-on connectivity.
There’s tons of third party buttons you can add. They don’t seem to be super popular.
I defy anyone to come up with an icon that is better than "PRINT".
True, but consider that "print" is just as easy to memorize its purpose as a squiggle.
I've lived in foreign countries, and traveled in countries where I don't speak the language at all. It doesn't take much to figure out what the words for "entry", "exit", "toilet", etc., mean.
And besides, English is the most international language in the world. Even if one doesn't know what "print" means, it's easy enough to look it up online or in a pocket dictionary. Keep in mind that there's no way to look up an icon.
Yeah, it is - but it doesn't make it right. Say you have a Cyrillic (not only Russia uses it) interface with non-Cyrillic wording. It feels your country is a 2nd hand one (which is likely true but that's not the point). Again the easy to memorize part comes from the fact the native alphabet is Roman based.
I speak there languages but in some places I'd not figure "exit".
Again, I do prefer text labels/buttons - it's just something that doesn't translate well/universally.
I think the difference with appliances, though, is that they’re rarely a matter of life and death, as compared to something like operating climate controls in a car at highway speeds.
A friend was considering various auto options in the mid-aughts and described to me their realisation that the "navigation package" (a US$1500 option) would be an obsolete-on-delivery system that would only get worse with time. Its functionality has been provided by a series of ever-improving smartphones and tablets, not to mention published paper maps and highway atlases, which have excellent resolution, response, high- and low-light readability, and are utterly immune to networking glitches or WiFi deserts.
Music and/or podcasts can be delivered from your tablet or smartphone. Over local FM broadcast if no other options exist (and that's far less glitchy and frustrating than Bluetooth IME).
People will always pursue status indicators like a peacock's tail.
Regardless though, I'm really glad to hear that this is really happening. Ideally I hope that it causes some introspection and less confidence when "improving" designs in our industry, but given that's a human problem rather than a tech or company problem, I'm not expecting it.
Next up, I hope people start realizing that "smart" appliances are also a regression :-D
That concludes this episode of "old man yells at cloud." Thanks for listening.
With knobs and buttons, you can feel for them whilst still having your vision in the road.
This must make it safer to drive.
As a MX5 (ND) driver, even having a knob to scroll around the screen is a poor design choice. Touch would have been better (you can hack that) whilst driving but, frankly, this kind of car shouldn’t have a screen at all. It’s a driving car, not a home entertainment system.
Appliances and cars can do this because they sell to adults.
In 20 years these knobs will be seen for the fad that it is.
More seriously, there are tradeoffs either way. Physical knobs give great feedback, require less cognitive load, and remain fixed. The latter is also where touch screens shine - the UI can evolve over time.
In some settings touch screens are superior to physical buttons and in other scenarios it is the reverse.
Choose the right button for the job.
I think that the problem comes with what the article mentions in the first paragraph—there are some places where UI might evolve with time, but my kitchen appliances, my washing machine, and much of my car are not places where I expect new UI paradigms, or want them if somebody dreams one up. Sure, the pendulum will eventually swing back again the other way to too much skeumorphism, but for now I'm going to push reflexively for physical buttons first, and ask questions later.
This is not necessarily a benefit. Such interfaces often break muscle memory when they change, often with no choice to the user. At least manufacturers can't come in when you have physical controls and suddenly replace your control panel without consent because they have a "better" one.
Having said that, at least 50% of the time that people change the experience, it makes it worst. So I agree that for companies that don't know how to design interfaces, this is maybe a benefit.
I think that also serves as a perverse incentive: no need to make it as perfect as possible the first time, you can always fix it later! Tech debt, coming to the controls of your moving 1~2 tons of metal, f yeah!
No thanks.
Another commenter beat me to it but I'll just join him to reinforce their point: UI changes also break muscle which is something extremely important to have in a car and in your home appliances. People just don't enjoy relearning their own machines when they expect the job to be done with minimal cognitive overhead.
Yeah no thanks.
Washing machines evolved from finicky one way turn relay knobs to tactile bidirectional digital knobs with buttons for options (like extra rinses, prewash, temperature, etc)
VCRs used to be so unusable they'd blink 12:00 because no one knew how to set the time. BluRay players and PVRs put everything on screen accessible via remote or mobile app.
Smart door locks make it very easy to lock/unlock a door via phone or watch vs futzing with keys that can be easily lost possibly requiring a new lock. Much better for guests or families.
Old dial or even digital thermostats were nearly impossible to properly schedule, modern digital thermostats use phones or websites, much easier (and also visualizes all your HVAC stats!)
Smart lights let you group lights together independent of power wiring, change colors, etc
Japanese in-seat toilet bidets with dashboards or remote are masterful compared to traditional bidets with faucets.
Single lever faucets vs separate dial faucets for hot/cold water
A Nest thermostat for example which is a mix of screen, physical button and dial, is way more usable and feature rich than old school digital thermostats with buttons and monochrome LED displays.
I'd love to just touch the two things together and hear a beep to know they're paired.
That would be the dream, yes.
I really don't miss the days where applications had to retrofit their controls onto a fixed physical setting.
Sure, maybe for dialling a phone number or texting it was better. But for everything else I do on a phone, give me a touchscreen.
I like the swipe to raise volume and temp, but the mirror and window controls are atrocious.
Side note: having window lock and child safety lock be a single control is a huge miss.
The second-best button expert is currently infuriated at missing out on their time to shine, presumably.
(I’m fascinated by what their metric is, here. Like, most-cited or something? She has, indeed, written a good few papers about buttons. Or just the one that everyone in the field says is the top button authority?)
Touchscreens are a menace. The most dangerous moments I have in my car are when I'm trying to skip the ads in my podcasts. Which got way worse since google removed default media buttons from maps. I bet that decision has an actual body count.
oh wait...
> setgear r ENTER
> r ENTER
/s
Never used one but it fell out of favor.