> Touch screen controls in automotive environment is such a bad idea
Touch screen controls are a bad idea in general when the form factor has space for adequate physical controls.
The only time they're an acceptable compromise is for small devices like phones. Even then careful use of a small number of buttons can be a great improvement.
One of the best features of switching from Android to an iPhone is the physical mute switch. Whenever I'm going into a meeting, I can mute my phone without taking it out of my pocket. With Androids (At least, version 6 from when I left) you have to take it out and go through all the separate volume menus. It was so refreshing to have the confidence that my phone wouldn't vibrate or disturb others during a meeting.
The situation is more nuanced than "touchscreens are bad"; the number of controls has grown exponentially since touchscreens have made it easier to put literally hundreds of buzzers and whistles on modern vehicles.
It's fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car. This is a feature that would never need to be operated while the vehicle is in motion, and likely wouldn't be configured more than once by any given owner.
Features like this are more than adequately served by touchscreen controls. Really, you would have a worse UI if there was a hardware slider for this on the dash.
But yes, all controls that a driver would want to use while the vehicle is in motion should be controllable with hardware controls that can be located and operated tactilely.
> "It's fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car. This is a feature that would never need to be operated while the vehicle is in motion, and likely wouldn't be configured more than once by any given owner."
Features like that could be implemented as dipswitches/etc hidden in a compartment under the hood, or not at all. The "configuration screen with a gazillion tweakable settings" thing has generally fallen out of favor in desktop and mobile software, and I expect the car industry will eventually catch up.
> The situation is more nuanced than "touchscreens are bad"; the number of controls has grown exponentially since touchscreens have made it easier to put literally hundreds of buzzers and whistles on modern vehicles.
Touchscreens aren't necessary for any of that, though. There are alternative, better UI interfaces. For instance: f-key driven soft menus. Those have tactile feedback, have reliable key-press detection, and can be operated with regular gloves.
The only situation in a car where I could see a touchscreen being the right option are cases where a soft keyboard is needed.
> It's fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car.... Features like this are more than adequately served by touchscreen controls.
My Honda has a button-operated menu for that, and that's better than a touchscreen.
> you would have a worse UI if there was a hardware slider for this on the dash.
I never said that cars should have a dedicated, physical control for each function. What I said was touchscreens are unnecessary and sub-optimal.
Commonly used functions should have dedicated physical controls, especially those that are likely to be used while in motion (driving controls, climate control, basic audio stuff). The next most common set of functions should be implemented with a combination of shortcut keys and f-keys. Finally, seldom-used functions (such as configuration) should be accessed with f-key driven menus.
I do like key-driven soft menus (like the steering wheel controls commonly used for HUDs or gauge cluster menus), but they get a bit unwieldy with longer lists. Some automakers (GM) address this by nesting all the options in a bunch of sub-menus, but I find this frustrating because I end up just having to search through a bunch of menus to find what I want.
Some automakers (Mazda, BMW) use a knob instead, which makes it a bit quicker to scroll through a longer list, but I have found myself overshooting and then having to back track which is sometimes annoying.
There's really pros and cons to whatever implementation is used. While I completely agree that any function that might be operated while driving needs to be able to be operable with hard controls, I also don't think it's a good idea to clutter those menus with a bunch of junk that you don't want or need while driving.
I think there's a good case to be made for 3 levels of controls:
* Things that must have dedicated hard keys: anything that must be adjusted rapidly for driver attentiveness, control, or comfort -- HVAC, audio levels and basic tuning, all lighting and vehicle controls.
* Things that must have hard keys, but can live in a shared menu: anything that a driver may want to adjust while driving, but is not essential for immediate use -- trip data, infotainment, non-critical gauge monitoring etc.
* Things that don't need hard keys and should not clutter any of the above interfaces: odd-ball configuration settings that a driver would not need to operate while driving -- key fob configuration, entry-exit preference configuration, software updates, integrations with external services, maintenance logs, etc.
I love the Command Center in my Mazda. I can switch modes, change content, many other things, all without looking at the knobs. Voice controls using Android Auto makes it even better, but I do not use it much since the knobs do a great job. I never use the touch screen.
Yep, Mazda were the most vocal about rejecting the touch screen trend, and Honda and Toyota are losing a lot of customers to Mazda who have been producing the best cars in their class in the last several years so it makes sense that they are jumping on the bandwagon.
Since peaking in 2015 Mazda is not growing. They are steadily losing market share over the last 10 years. They make attractive cars, but they bet on pretending that they are a "premium" brand and priced themselves out.
Interesting. I from what I have seen of Mazda's price range, even within a model, it's pretty large. You can get a CX-5 base for mid 20s, or the turbocharged, leather-wrapped nav-included tour package for almost 40.
The CX-5 is at the higher end of their starting prices, too. They have the Mazda3, CX-3, CX-30 and Mazda6 that are all cheaper base.
And to be sure, Mazda's crossovers look much better than Honda or Toyota - at least Toyota finally refreshed their interiors two years ago to look like something other than 2003 era.
In terms of sales volume in the US, you are correct: Mazda is not selling more cars. If you look at their financial reporting, they're making more money from car sales. Looks like ~60% more.
Anyone with a lick of business sense would happily trade -10% sales volume for +60% profit from higher margins. They didn't price themselves out, they just decided to not play the loss-leader volume game Ford/Honda/Toyota is playing.
From what I can tell from the investor docs, the overall loss was from exchange rates and tariffs from losing access to sharing Ford's factories and costs and the high capex to building a replacement factory and generally transitioning to a fully independent automaker.
Every shareholder report in the last couple years stated that their premium offerings are doing better than they expected and they're making more money than they expected given the capex.
Mass market automakers usually target ~7% margin, so a 9% change in exchange rate without adjustment in price would make an automaker flip from profitable to unprofitable (observable with Nissan as a real world example). It doesn't decrease their profit by 9%.
Mazda raised their margin target to ~10% per vehicle, which is pretty standard for the premium segment. Which if they performed to expectations, would mean 40% more profit; they're slightly overperforming at ~60%.
I have a 2013 Accord with a touch screen (bought it used and it's what came with it) instead of button controls. The latency on the screen is terrible and my father's Acura RDX which does not have a touch panel is much more user-friendly. I would love if more manufacturers started to put more analog controls back into their cars, but kept the non-touch screens for info display/backup cameras.
Funny coming from Honda. My parents own a 2017 (I think) Civic and the only way to adjust volume is by tapping +/- on the touchscreen. It's the most unusable volume adjustment I've ever experienced. It was completely unusable with a glove in the winter.
So while most other companies only implemented touchscreen controls for secondary features Honda did it for the most widely used one. Now they are backtracking 100%, go figure.
I just got a 2020 Civic. There are touch screen control, but volume, music, climate control (up and down, not which vents), tuner, cruise control, and a number of other things are all physical buttons and knobs. I mostly have Android Auto up with music and map going on the touch screen while actually driving anyway, so more physical interfaces are a-ok by me.
I'm in the same boat with my 2019 ridgeline. To me, this is the best of both worlds. Most days, I don't even have to look at the touchscreen much less interact with it.
I have a 2015 Fit (Jazz in the not US), and it has the +/- on the touch screen, but also physical buttons on the steering wheel. I guess the compromise is that the driver doesn't need to use the touch buttons because they have the ones on the wheel, and the passenger can take their eyes off the road.
At least in the US models of the Fit there's no difference in the interior trim levels. I think part of the confused nature of this discussion is that Honda never shipped the touch-only dashboard that this article is talking about in the US market. The Fit and as far as I have seen every model Honda sells in the US has always had real knobs and switches for the climate controls. The touch climate controls were available in Japan and elsewhere.
For the 2016 year model, the base model has a volume knob but the higher models do not. The 'USA interior' link above seems identical to the Non-USA link vs audio volume knob not being there.
This is what the dash looks like for models with the knob (could only find 2015 lx but looks identical to 2016 lx):
https://cdn.jdpower.com/ChromeImageGallery/Expanded/White/64...
My 2017 Honda had a dial for adjusting the volume (it could also be pushed in to switch off).
The issue with new Hondas is that switching off/on the air conditioning, or air flow/fan speed, has to be done via touch screen. They do have dials for temperature control and a button to bring up the Climate UI.
One of the major changes between the 2018 and 2019 Honda model years was the addition of a physical volume knob on the main touch screen. Evidently this was one of the biggest complaints and they actually listened.
Eminently sensible call by Honda. Knobs, dials and switches work well and do not demand that a driver takes their eyes off the road. I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective.
My car has onboard voice controls, but, unlike Siri via the car's audio system, they suck. Recognition is slow and unreliable enough that I never bother, and if I did, the cognitive overhead would be unacceptably high anyway. They'd have done better not to bother implementing them at all and instead just offload that work to the driver's paired smartphone, which for a sedan that listed $32k new, it's very reasonable to assume will be present.
It's interesting, when I had my Windows phone and linked it with my 2014 Ford Fiesta which had Microsoft Sync, it was incredibly fast, responsive and a joy to use. Once you got the format of your queries down, it was super easy to use. They had a button on the wiper knob. Press it, wait for the beep and your're off and running. It synced up instantly. As soon as your phone was connected via bluetooth, you were good to go.
I had a text conversation with my GF back and forth for almost two hours, just by using the speech to text recognition capability of the Sync in my Fiesa, it was really amazing to me how well it worked.
My 2016 Toyota Corolla has something similar and pairs with my iphone and its a total nightmare. it takes literally ten minutes for it to sync up. That's after the phone has already been connected via Bluetooth. The command queries don't often work, you have to repeat them several times, and then after three of four times of saying the same thing over and over, you finally just give up. I'm not sure if its just with the iphone, but it really does suck.
It might just be the car. Unless I invoke the onboard voice recognition, my Altima essentially behaves as a Bluetooth headset powered by internal combustion, and Siri is as usable that way as via the phone's own speakers and mic.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if that were heavily dependent on the quality of the car's audio system, though; I went for the best available trim package, figuring that if I had to go back to owning a car again then it might as well at least be as comfortable as I could manage, and I might not have so good an experience here if I had economized a bit more.
>My car has onboard voice controls, but, unlike Siri via the car's audio system, they suck
Using Siri is more dangerous than driving and texting:
"Undistracted drivers typically showed a one-second reaction time. Those who used the voice-controlled Apple CarPlay saw a 36% increase in their reaction time, which rose to 57% when they used the touch interface."
Yeah, well, people are selective in their concerns. How much does it affect reaction time to have passengers in the car who you may talk to, or may be doing all sorts of things that distract you?
No. Even if they were helping, they would have to communicate things to you in a way where you could interpret them and react more quickly than just doing it yourself.
Passengers are largely not helping, and certainly are not good at communicating problems.
It's a little unfair to say that it's worse than texting. The increase to reaction time for texting was 34.7%, while Android Auto only showed an increase of 30% on voice. The 36% increase for Siri also was specifically for voice navigation, with voice media control showing no statistically significant increase in reaction time.
You're likely keeping your eyes on the road more with voice control over texting, though this one is hard to compare as the studies didn't measure it quite the same. Voice controls all came in under the NHTSA 12 second recommendation. The texting study showed an increase in time spent looking away from the road from a baseline of 10% to 40%.
Even human to human level, every safety critical application rely on voice commands has to implement very rigid and strong standards and rules on human speech.
This is a great example of when "perfect is the enemy of good".
Humans have pretty good spatial reasoning (proprioception); the notion that touch controls should replace tactile well-spaced controls is dependent on the fact that both senses (sight, spatial awareness) are uncontested.
I would argue the point that sight is already in-use and must not be interfered with, if there's an alternative that does not use the same resources.
I think of it like hardware acceleration and parrelelisation; the brain has a hardware accelerator for sight, but only one, and has a bunch of cores ready for other tasks, and those other tasks can happen in parallel.
Taking your hand off the steering wheel isn't so bad. It's loss of attention, even for 1 second, that's extremely dangerous. Touch screens make you look away from the road. Knobs and buttons do not. However, jamming them all into the steering wheel may then cause the same problem, as if there's too many things in the same area you'd have to look down to find what you're looking for.
Taking one hand off the wheel is nowhere near as bad as taking your eyes off the road. With physical knobs, I can use muscle memory to reach out and adjust them without taking my eyes off the road.
Some cars already do. My car has buttons on the steering wheel which allow you to navigate menus, control the radio, etc. As well as paddles to control over functions. The problem is if you are not on a straight road those controls become virtually impossible to use safely. Whereas if I quickly need to change the volume or even mute the radio I can do so one handed without even glancing at the volume dial on the radio and still steer the car safely.
Yes, taking one hand off the steering wheel is much better than taking your eyes off the road. Let's be honest here, we're not driving F1 cars so we don't actually physically need to be with both hands on the wheel 100% of the time, but it can take only second of us not looking at the road and we could be hitting someone/something and be dead (or we could kill that someone that we've just hit).
I really, really love to drive, I think I'm one of the few Europeans who chose to drive from Eastern Europe till the Atlantic Coast and back for his vacation just because I like driving (and wanted to see how Europe actually looks like outside of the big cities), and as such I can tell you that lack of attention (i.e. not seeing where you go and not seeing how the people around you are going) is the number one factor of accidents. I think there's nothing else that comes close to it.
Having actually used voice controls in a car, it is worse than taking one hand off the steering wheel. It is also worse than a touch screen interface. It really is the worst of all options.
Because they suck at recognition.
I've noticed the mental effort I spend in trying to formulate a voice command that the car (or even phone) will understand is significant - and that almost none of my brain is being used for driving. The likelihood of it not recognizing what I said is not low. With tactile buttons, it's almost automatic. I don't spend any time thinking. I know where the buttons are, and my finger is good at finding it.
On the few occasions where I'm not sure where my finger landed, I can still slowly move my finger to an edge and start counting. I can do this over several seconds. Often while doing this I have to attend to an event on the road, and it's trivial to do so: I pause my finger search, attend to the event on the road, and then resume. So even if it takes 10-30s to find my button (very rare), it can be done with almost no loss of attention on the road. The same goes if I need to pause to listen/respond to what someone else in the car is saying.
Contrast that with voice recognition: If I have to pause to attend to anything on the road, the recognition system assumes I'm done talking. This adds more mental stress (maybe it will execute the wrong command? In any case I'll have to start over).
Now I'll go further and make an even stronger claim: Even if voice recognition becomes almost perfect (better than humans), it will still be a greater cognitive load to use voice recognition. For me, changing stations on the radio or adjusting the volume or adjusting the climate control is pretty automatic. The cognitive load of finding the preset station is virtually none. Whereas just formulating the command verbally - even to another human where I wouldn't worry about voice recognition - takes more effort. Perhaps verbal skills are tied to the vision in the brain and tactile senses are not? I wonder if any studies have been done on this.
I do not like button on steering wheels. I drive at 10-and-2 so unless I know where the damn button I'm looking for is, I have to move my hands to look under them on the steering wheel. I have a Ford where all the buttons are mostly the same.
If you forced me to have them, I'd prefer something like a d-pad on each side because they are easy to locate without looking and intuitive to select. Critical controls should be stalks, IMHO. I can't use cruise control in the car I've owned for six years without looking at the steering wheel, but I test drove a Subaru, which I haven't owned for like 9 years, and immediately remembered how to operate the cruise stalk.
"Undistracted drivers typically showed a one-second reaction time. Those who used the voice-controlled Apple CarPlay saw a 36% increase in their reaction time, which rose to 57% when they used the touch interface."
Yes but they're uselessly complex. I've owned a top-of-the-line Ridgeline with voice control for over a year and I still don't remember any of the sequences of specific commands it recognizes.
Any car needs to be connected to a central server where the processing occurs. Useful levels of voice recognition just aren't going to happen inside the car.
The problem there is that they try to parse voice as natural language -- if they instead made a simple programming language with a consistent format.. you'd be able to process the voice locally (speech-to-text has been mostly effective since like the 95s) and actually make it memorizable and semi-explorable.
And if you added a semicolon-keyword like "over" for radio, you'd avoid the issue where it waits a minute to see if you finished, making usage agonizingly slow.
But we somehow still haven't reached the point where people/corps finally realize that we simply can't parse natural language effectively
Exactly - touchscreen offer no unique tactile feedback you can associate with an individual action. Also when the screen is multi use depending upon options then you really handicap the muscle memory and with that, cause distractions.
However, I do feel HUD display tech is one area in which could do with some love as would compliment and be less distracting over a screen located away from the drivers view of vision.
I like physical controls better, but I don't think that's a totally realistic contrast. Neither touchscreens nor knobs necessarily demand you look. I've known lots of people who looked while using physical buttons, and I can do my common touchscreen tasks in my car (e.g. switch to Bluetooth, hit play or pause) without looking. I suspect most people will look in both cases.
Voice control sucks IMO, even though a lot of people now grow up with Alexa and similar and adapt to the technology. Why does it suck, just like some "smart" buttons? Because it's not obvious what it can do. You have to learn the vocabulary it understands and its other limitations (tone etc.). For example, I tried to get my Tesla to text one of my contacts recently and failed. I didn't know whether it just didn't understand me or was unable to. Good UI are obvious and don't require you to memorize secret capabilities.
not obvious to you. I suspect younger generations won't have much of an issue with this, similar to how millenials learned how to utilize google search easily while it confounded their parents
Have you watched a younger person search? Most of them don't have any clue what they're doing either. Presumably it's just more socially acceptable for older people to admit their ignorance. :)
In a car it's even worse because you have to tell everyone in the car (or on the phone) to stop talking, give your command, wait for the confirmation and then everyone can continue talking.
I always hunt down and hit the “factory reset” menu option on every car I rent, though. If you don’t, you never know what weird settings the previous users have changed.
I also un-pair all the hundreds of paired bluetooth phones, if the reset hasn’t already done that. I often rent cars where the address book is full of names and numbers from previously paired phones.
This past January, I rented an Audi Q7. It was brand new and had the Audi Virtual Cockpit which took me a full two days to grasp to the point where I could use it safely and required me to pull over several times to figure something out. Worse, the rental agency had removed the owner's manuals so I was without reference. One of the goofiest things was that the navigation moving map would mysteriously stop moving--allowing the car (me) to drive off the edge of the map--and didn't allow me to move the map, to re-center by touch, while the car was in motion, instead presenting an alert saying that the action was unavailable while the car was moving. As I was driving in an unfamiliar city, this issue forced me to stop several times so that I could see the map surrounding the car, it was simply horrible.
To complicate things, the rental agency had bound the two key fobs together with steel cable. This caused the car to arbitrarily recall the user settings from one key or the other--presumably whichever key it happened to recognize first. This had the effect of making the system behave even more randomly as it unevenly switched back and forth between the two user profiles each time I started the car. Every time I'd think I had tamed the user preferences, the "other" set would get loaded, changing the preferences. I solved this by removing the key battery from one of the keys but even with just a single profile, it was a remarkably trying experience and one that seemed to have been engineered for frivolous, show-offy, reasons rather than solid, task-solving reasons.
Mercedes-Benz has, in recent years, also made their UX very flashy and fiddly even though they are not using a touch screen. Just tuning a radio station is a multi-step process requiring the traversal of several menus but lacking the feedback in the sub-menus that is needed to let the user know they have actually made a selection. The user must come back all the way to the top of the menu structure to see if the selection they made two or three steps earlier has had any effect.
This is one direction that I never wanted a car dashboard to go towards. The amount of information packed into a dashboard is overwhelming. Most of them is not relevant to the daily commute.
Who wants to know you water temperature measured to a 0.5degC accuracy?
That keys-with-steel-cable thing car rental companies do is terrible. And there is absolutely no point in doing so. Either give me two separate keys so two drivers can use them, or just give me one key.
The honest truth to why they do it is because they don't want to be in a situation where they're shipping keys around between locations (or even pretending to inventory/store them) because people keep forgetting to bring back both or lose one and the other one is in an office in another state. You're far less likely to lose both keys than just one because of how obnoxious it is. And having 2 keys is actually a reasonable increase in re-sale/auction value because of how expensive/difficult it is to re-key cars these days (unless you're a criminal then it's really easy and cheap apparently).
I suspect you are correct. I looked it up and, on the 2020 Q7, the fob itself is ~$350 and the Audi-dealer required re-programming is $150, so, at least $450 to replace a fob.
The two Audi smart key fobs together weighs too much for a pants or light jacket pocket, especially on that steel cable. A day or so after I removed the battery from one fob, I stopped at a Home Depot and used a bolt cutter to cut the cable and separate the fobs. I returned the keys to the rental agency on a large steel keyring. They didn't seem to mind.
You just gave me flashbacks to renting my first Audi and not being able to leave the lot for a good 15 minutes before I could figure out what the hell was going on. Audi sponsored the whole thing but it backfired because I would NEVER drive one again after that, or recommend to anyone - what happened to cars?
Newer Suburus are almost as bad. Tesla is too but at least it's all located on one panel.
Most everything on the Tesla screen is non-essential other than the current speed (which while driving is always displayed prominently in a large font and in the closest place) and possibly some alerts that rarely happen, such as “tire pressure low” in actual words, not just a cryptic glowing red icon on the dashboard.
Voice control still isn't there yet. Siri frequently thinks I'm talking to her when I say "hey [kid's name]" — despite the fact that my kid's name shares zero letters with "Siri", either in English or in IPA.
This is pretty surprising/disappointing, considering that the /s/ sound is pretty distinct, and considering that I did the "hey Siri" training when I got my phone.
It's started working pretty well on my Tesla. I can tell it to set the thermostat, turn on specific heated seats, play music, call or text someone, etc. It's not perfect but it gets better every update and we get an update at least once a month if not more.
Thinking of voice-activation in a car in lieu of analog manual controls misses the point - perhaps you weren't advocating for it as a replacement, but the article above seems to.
There are multiple points of failures for a voice-control only interface for a high-speed moving vehicle:
1. Problems with NLP, and needing to adjust oneself to the proprietary format of this particular car's voice recognition grammar/syntax/parsing/etc. (discussed elsewhere in this thread)
2. Loud location (driving by a jackhammer)
3. Female voices [1]
4. AAVE voices [2]
5. Immigrant voices [1]
Some argument can be made that 3-5 could be improved on with larger training sets. Given that we're still working off of much of the same recording equipment that we developed in the early 20th century, this is only true up to a point in regards to #3, since it's difficult to calibrate higher pitched "noise" out and keep higher pitched voices in when they're at a similar range.
Even assuming all the above problems are solved, there are still the cases of someone losing their voice temporarily due to illness, or someone speech-disabled but otherwise able-bodied, and the cases of a computer malfunction in the car itself that causes voice recognition to break. I was in such an incident myself quite recently, where a rented Mini Cooper's onboard computer made it appear that the engine was overheating (red hot engine symbol) and that I must cease driving immediately lest the car explodes. After the car was off, the computer malfunctioned so severely that attempting to turn the car on only resulted in a light-up display of every error message the car had.
All that to say - voice controls are not a suitable replacement for standard knobs and dials, and the latter should always be available as a reliable back-up method for operating a car.
I drive a 2010 Honda Jazz (Honda Fit in the US I believe) and I love it.
Not only does it indeed have buttons, but good buttons as well. Clicky where needed, rubbery where appropriate, with the righ amount of resistance etc.
Just like the iPhone always has the nicest buttons of any phone. It's a little thing that makes using it a pleasure.
I love the big knobs and switches on my 2013 Honda Fit. They are big and chunky so it's easy to tell the difference between the vent and the temperature on the AC. Everything about it is simple and ergonomic. Although I kind of wish I went with the manual instead of the automatic sometimes.
Our 2008 Honda Civic (EU-spec) was similarly well-designed. Controls you were likely to use while driving (temperature/windscreen-clearing, radio, hazard lights, etc.) were raised up closer to your eye-line[1]. It was a really ergonomic "cockpit"
Voice controls are nice. Except when you get a sore throat. I'm not talking about disabled people, people with funny accents (everybody speaks English of course and if they don't, they at least speak one of the five other languages we proudly support) and people with non-standard timbre of voice, also.
What if--and stay with me for a moment--what if it's good for different manufacturers to have different approaches to the problem, giving people the option to choose Honda for buttons or Tesla for touchscreens?
What if there are legitimate arguments for both and it's good that there's both options available?
I do hope other automakers follow, because why should a head-unit should be considered safe to operate while driving, while touching a smartphone display isn't.
Both lacks the tactile feedback buttons are offering, both don't work with gloves and both requires you to look at the display (and stop looking at the road) to know what action you're making.
I will never understand how this trend started in the first place. If you look at e.g. digital cameras, they all have touch screens these days, but they also still have buttons and dials everywhere. The one in front of me has eight physical buttons, seven dials and a power switch. The reason is obvious: when you're taking photos, you don't want to be looking down at a screen; you want to be focused on the task at hand and aware of what is happening around you. If camera designers know this, why don't automotive designers, where the task at hand is a matter of life and death?
I can only conclude from the situation you describe, as well as the fact that most cameras (as cameras, not phones) still lack GPS and sometimes Wi-Fi, that a great many industrial designers are trend-following, uncreative bores.
Most modern car interior controls are horrible (Tesla’s giant laggy touchscreen included).
Why do I need my camera to have GPS? In what situation would I be equipped with a camera and not my phone, which certainly has a GPS? This seems like the same instinct that makes OEMs put mobile modems in laptops, as if I would ever have my laptop but not my phone to which to tether it.
Because you would want your photos to be geotagged.
Also, whenever you are starting a sentence such as "In what circumstance..." and making blanket assertions, it's better to take a step back and question if other people's circumstances are radically different from yours. That's what good product thinking is about.
Thanks. I am familiar with why you want location data in photos. I am not familiar with any justification for why this data cannot be acquired from my mobile.
It possibly could be done in real-time using Bluetooth but I doubt it would be reliable and remember that higher end cameras might be writing out images at maybe 6+ frames/second. Alternatively you can make a point of recording a track on your phone (which tends to be hard on the battery life) and then syncing them up later. But, as someone who has done this, it's a pain in the neck.
Geotagging on my X-T3 with the Camera remote Android app is very reliable to be honest. And you don't have to query the phone at the same rate as you're taking pictures, it's perfectly sane to assume the same location for 5-10 seconds during a burst.
Fair enough. Though I'm not sure I'm convinced that, today, you're not just better off putting a GPS receiver in the camera. GPS is a bit hard on battery life but with the bigger batteries in these cameras, I'm not sure that's much of an issue. (And of course you can turn it off.)
Depends. MILCs are generally pretty hard on battery and keeping a constant GPS lock would exacerbate their generally poor "active standby" (camera turned on with the viewfinder or LCD active) battery life. On the other hand, my smartphone, using both GPS and augmented network location services can instead very quickly acquire a lock when needed with minimal battery usage only when needed. And it also has a way larger battery, and the system is generally more optimized.
Not everyone carries a phone, let alone a smartphone.
Not everyone wants to.
Geotagging pictures is a very important use case for a professional photographer, and relying on the user to provide GPS through another device is not advisable.
Also phone location services may not work very well without a cell signal, and not everyone takes photos only within range of a cell tower.
> This seems like the same instinct that makes OEMs put mobile modems in laptops, as if I would ever have my laptop but not my phone to which to tether it.
A cellular radio in a laptop gets access to better antennas and a vastly larger battery than what's found in a smartphone.
Laggy? The Tesla Model 3 touchscreen is anything but.
I had many reservations about the touchscreen prior to ownership, however I don't really have any complaints now. You get used to it, Tesla's specifically is not laggy, and most critical stuff is on the steering wheel/stalk anyway.
lower parts count as well. More commonality possibilities between vehicles are possible. the ability to add and remove features at different prive points without having to add/remove as many physical parts is huge. They price compete on bolts and screws...removing a button is a huge cost savings when multiplied by you
Ya, Volvo has gone to a unified interface for their whole lineup. The standard stuff can be controlled with a few knobs and buttons and all the minor differences between models and trim levels are controlled on screen. I'm sure it saves them a ton since the part count would be very low now.
They've done a pretty good job at it too, but it needs to be customizable to be great. If I ordered the surround camera option, I want that to be easy to access, not buried a few gestures deep. Chrysler nailed it, they let you rearrange the touch screen icons and have a bar along the bottom where you can put items that are always visible. They also have more buttons and dials.
I would think that would be where good context aware software would come into play.
Shouldn't it just automatically show the surround camera when I am in reverse or in some parking mode? I feel like that could be a setting or a soft button that appears when appropriate.
> Shouldn't it just automatically show the surround camera when I am in reverse or in some parking mode?
For the past couple years, US law requires that they default to the backup camera when in reverse (which is dumb, but that's another discussion). At least surround view is only one tap from there. Other manufacturers still do this better by showing both the backup camera AND the surround cameras at the same time and the Volvo screen is plenty large enough to handle this since other manufacturers with smaller screens do it well.
It should do it in parking mode, but it doesn't! The car even switches to a top view illustration of the car to show you the ultrasonic sensor readings when you're close to stuff (ie. when you're parking) but it doesn't turn the surround cameras on!
I never buy this argument. I'm sure we could've focus grouped seat belts and no one would've liked the experience but thank god we have them now, for the better.
We did "sorta" focus group seat belts, and I was there to witness it.
Before laws mandated the use of seat belts, most people didn't use them. My mother bought a Volvo 122 in the 1960s, and people marvelled at the three-point harness.
But it's not like US manufacturers rushed to take advantage of Volvo making the patents freely available, and nor did Volvo take over the world by storm.
Some cars had alarms that nagged the driver if the seat belts weren't done up. I recall my uncle routed around this by looping the driver and "shotgun" belts -behind- the seats and fastening them.
Left to their own devices, large numbers of people prefer convenience and low price to safety. Only by regulation did the mass market adopt safer cars.
So I completely agree, no, people did not like wearing seat belts. They only did so when their option to forgo safety was removed.
p.s. I recall watching this PSA in Ontario. Everyone laughed about it, but soooooo many young men then went out and drove their muscle cars sans belt. Enjoy.
You can't use the market as an example of it, because the producers shifted in (almost) unison, and bundled it with other more valuable features.
The same thing happened with 3DTVs -- the manufacturers all decided this was the next big thing, and shifted all their production to it, and it turns out.. it wasn't. But we as consumers had a 5-year drought where you simply couldn't buy a new TV that wasn't 3D. The same is happening with SmartTVs today -- if I want a new TV that isn't bottom-of-the-barrel tier, my only option is Smart.
When I got leased a VW Jetta a few years back, you had the option of no-touchscreen.. but that was the lowest-featured car, so you have up 10 other things for it.
You can also find the same thing in MacBooks with the touchbar -- once it was out, your only real options were to buy it, or throw the baby out and buy nothing/windows.
You can't judge whether customers like them, because it's bundled to other far more valuable aspects.
The Macbook touchbar holds a likely never-to-be-surpassed record for "The World's Most Useless Touchscreen". I literally cannot imagine how this UI abortion got to market. To me, the touchbar was the canary that Apple's innovation days were done. Sometimes, it's really NOT a good thing to "think different"(ly)...
Apple replaced the function keys because they were increasingly disused (and to increase the BOM and consequently the margin in absolute dollars.) The Touch Bar gets used more often. The default modes aren’t to everyone’s taste, but they’re easy for inexperienced users (based on our user observation) and power users like the potential to customize (check out BetterTouchTool if you haven’t yet.)
I'd like to see everything controllable through the touch screen, but then have plenty of physical buttons and knobs that can be programmed to map to elements on the touch screen.
That way, if there is a software update; and there is a new feature it can be mapped to a button by the user in the way that they want.
> physical buttons and knobs that can be programmed to map to elements on the touch screen
Agreed, this is the end game.
The original CTS (circa 2003) did this. It had four buttons and a rotary dial on the steering wheel that you could assign to the functions of your choosing. This was a groundbreaking usability enhancement at the time. They also had a dial on the ceiling for the sunroof where you just turn it to the position you want the sunroof to open to (ex. 50%) and then the sunroof would open that amount. It was brilliantly simple and elegant.
Unfortunately, Cadillac went in reverse for a number of years afterwards... dropping the customizable buttons, dropping the sunroof dial, making touchsensative (but not actually tactile) physical controls. Finally, this year they have gone back to real tactile controls!
BMW has been using assignable buttons for over a decade now. I loved having one button to go to my favorite radio station, another button to call my wife, another to set the nav system to navigate home. The buttons are also sensitive to resistive touch, so if you put your finger on the button without actually pushing it, it will tell you on the screen what that button has been assigned to. I think BMW does tactile controls better than any other car I've owned. Not that many BMW owners use them, but even the signal light wand is a delight for tactile senses.
There may be other automakers who do the assignable button thing too, would love to hear from anyone who knows of others.
I was a little disappointed in the controls in the new volvo I bought last year. They have a mix of touchscreen controls and a limited number of tactile buttons and knobs. They got really close to getting it right. They at least need to make the screen configurable so you can put your most used functions on the home screen.
Fiat-Chrysler got this right at least. Their UConnect system has a system bar along the bottom of the screen that is always visible and you can decide which buttons you want there (heated steering wheel control, surround cameras, etc). If I wanted to bring up the surround cameras on the Volvo as I'm pulling into a parking space, I'd have to swipe right, tap cameras, then switch the surround view, with slight UI delays in between each of these gestures -- not ideal when pulling into a parking space. BMW (and the new Corvette C8) have a dedicated tactile button for this, Chrysler lets you put that "button" on the home row of the touchscreen... both are much better solutions.
Hopefully the automakers are coming out of a learning phase right now and things are about to get much better as everyone has tried terrible touchscreens and learned why there needs to be more buttons.
Jaguar/Land Rover have been starting to do this. They have knobs where the knob label is a tiny screen and they change function based on the context of the menu you are in.
Automotive designers are simply catering to their perceived marketplace in order to realize maximum profit extraction.
Most people who drive would prefer to be insulated from the activity as much as is legally possible. Fly-by-wire everything, touch interfaces, etc. This is how you achieve that objective. These "innovations" are obviously the antithesis of safe. But, we all know money is more important than safety, and most consumers are attracted exclusively to this kind of shiny bullshit.
I think there's too much selection bias for this analogy to be particularly strong.
Digital cameras are increasingly a niche product that exist mainly to cater to people who specifically want a the "SLR" user experience. If you just want to take decent enough photos, your smartphone's camera today is better than most prosumer DSLRs from like five years ago.
I don't think today's DSLRs have the form factor that they have because it's objectively more usable. It's just the form factor that their self-selected customers want. One piece of evidence in favor of that is that all DSLRs do have big LCD screens on the back and often require a lot of menu diving to access any functionality that didn't exist in cameras before the digital revolution.
There's still a physical dial for switching modes even though that's not something you actually change that often. Meanwhile you often have to dig into a menu or go through crappy buttons to do things like delete a photo.
I won't go so far as to describe it as fetishization, because I think that's unfairly critical. But I do think a camera UX designed from first principles purely for usability would not have the same physical controls as a typical DSLR.
> I don't think today's DSLRs have the form factor that they have because it's objectively more usable. It's just the form factor that their self-selected customers want. One piece of evidence in favor of that is that all DSLRs do have big LCD screens on the back and often require a lot of menu diving to access any functionality that didn't exist in cameras before the digital revolution.
So on my seven year old Nikon D3s I can use buttons to focus and change the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, WB, focusing mode and focus selection point all the while keeping my eye to the viewfinder. I would almost never look at the rear screen except to check the always-on histogram if the lighting radically changed. This means I can react instantly during a sequence of shots without even thinking about the menu system. It is not just 'what I want' but a massive amount of directly accessible usability and configurability. Going into the menu system would almost never be necessary during a typical shoot.
The D850 I recently upgraded to is pretty much the same. I use the live-view screen on the D850 when shooting video but use the viewfinder and buttons (as above) when shooting stills.
I'll just add that mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras mostly became serious tools once electronic viewfinders became good enough that they could reasonably replace optical viewfinders for the most part. (Still not as good but a reasonable compromise given the smaller and lighter bodies they make possible.) As the say the LCD back can provide useful feedback--and are occasionally useful for specific situations when shooting--but at least for handheld shooting they're not often used for framing the subject.
And, to the original point of the discussion, these cameras also have lots of physical buttons and dials which are nice to have when they're properly designed.
> So on my seven year old Nikon D3s I can use buttons to focus and change the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, WB, focusing mode and focus selection point all the while keeping my eye to the viewfinder.
Sure, and you could do that with an SLR from the 90s too, as I recall.
Camera manufacturers are very innovative when it comes to capabilities and new features, but incredibly conservative when it comes to user experience and form factor.
But that's not the original point, though. jetrink's claim was:
> they also still have buttons and dials everywhere. ... The reason is obvious: when you're taking photos, you don't want to be looking down at a screen
I agree that physical affordances are very useful. But I don't think the cause of DSLRs having them is because current manufacturers believe buttons have superior usability. It's because SLRs have had those same controls since before touchscreens existed and today's self-selected DSLR camera audience specifically wants products with that "vintage" user experience.
My evidence is that today's cameras generally only have hardware controls for features that existed since before the digital revolution. Purely new capabilities (like file management) have not included corresponding new hardware controls. Likewise, hardware controls that are no longer that useful, like mode selectors, are still present.
To me, this implies that camera manufacturers are not just trying to provide a "hardware control" UX, they are specifically providing "the hardware control UX of 90s SLRs".
Yeah, that’s what I hate about taking pictures with their iPhone, the lack of a tactile button for taking the shot. It’s especially bad when you have to photograph without a view of the screen.
(So that you don’t guess, I mean when photographing the back of my head or the inside of a tight crawl space when my cat got inside.)
I don't think it does anymore. You have to activate the screen and slide left to get the camera. The volume buttons still work for the shutter though, which I use all the time.
I think because cars, although primarily a form of transport, are often also a fashion accessory, or a statement of who you are (or aspire to be). And touchscreens are very fashionable[1].
Cameras aren't really like that. Nowadays if you've actually bought a camera as opposed to just using the one in your phone you're probably at least a little bit into photography, and in that context the function matters more than the form and style.
[1] I'll grant that cost, along with simplicity of reconfiguration via software, may also be factors.
They make cars significantly cheaper to produce - both in terms of parts and construction time. Evey button you lose is a button you don't have source and install when building the car. There's less wiring, less replacement parts to stock. It's a win in all kinds of situations for the manufacturer.
It's no coincidence that the company with most manufacturing issues - Tesla - also went with completely touchscreen based cabin with pretty much no additional cost. This is further confirmed by the fact that they didn't offset the screen issue by installing a projected HUD display (which is these days available in most 20.000$ cars) - it's complicated to install.
The cost argument should also apply to the camera manufacturers and yet they have enough common sense to not make decisions that (to me) are user-hostile. Teslas are in a different boat - it seems that whatever they do, people will still line up to buy their stuff, at least for the time being.
For consumer cameras it definitely has happened. But for professional DSLRs you’re serving are market that absolutely puts function over form, and will happy pay a big premium for a devices that makes them more productive.
Much easier to justify the extra cost of switches when you know your customers will happily pay a premium for them.
It's all subjective, to me the touch screen on Model 3 is a deal breaker - I don't want to make this big a compromise for something this expensive. Other people have different utility functions, but from my perspective it seems that part of the reason to buy it is Tesla hype. It's a car, it moves me from point A to B, it gets stuck in the traffic exactly like everyone else's car, am I really getting ~$10k more worth out of it compared to other products?
A lot of people don’t understand the touch screen isn’t really needed while driving, except for glancing at the speed maybe.
And since you ask, you get that 10k or more back in gas savings. On top of that there are other benefits, some of them objective and monetary such as resale value ($), safety ($$$), environmental responsibility, longevity of the car ($$), fun, and speed. So, yes. You should test drive one and see what it feels like.
And that’s just comparing to gas cars. Comparing to competing electric cars would be a different list of benefits.
>it gets stuck in the traffic exactly like everyone else's car
Ohhhh no no it is waaaay different because I make the lights that you don’t. Yes sometimes get stuck in traffic but not nearly as much. I can observe speed limits and still be way ahead of you because of the acceleration speed (quickness). Acceleration ability also means being able to keep longer follow distance in traffic without losing chances to pass safely when they open up.
Problem of course is that the interior of a Tesla has the aesthetic sense of a consumer electronics manufacturer, not of a precision automobile. It looks like a big fuckin' iPad stuck to the dashboard, almost aftermarket. It's tacky, even if the interface on the screen is better than most.
Way prefer the Mazda / Honda direction of moving back to switchgear. It looks and functions better, it can be discretely repaired and replaced by a normal person, and so forth.
What kills me is when "legacy" automakers have dashboards with 40 buttons on them, of which you use may 5 regularly. It's especially annoying when the functions I use every day are buried in nested menus, but the button for setting the clock, sending a text, or satellite radio is right there front and center.
Those supposed manufacturing issues are outdated rumors from the early days of the production lines when they were getting off the ground.
>went with completely touchscreen based cabin
Absolutely false. There are plenty of buttons and other physical controls in easy reach on the steering wheel and in other convenient and sensible places. As well as optional (you don’t need them) voice controls. It’s not “completely” anything based.
I just got a new camera, and the touchscreen wonderfully compliments the three dials I have. They have several physical shortcut buttons to back out of menus and to get to quick actions more quickly.
Tactile feedback and quicker response time on certain actions is amazing, and just using the camera is a blast.
My 2014 mazda has some touch functions, but the main radio controls and the entire climate interface are all still knobs and buttons. The clock is separate from the entertainment screen. I love it!
In the 90s and 2000s, cars had too many buttons and knobs. And
car reviewers started using that as a criterion to judge the dashboard. So less became better. OCD!
It started with the iPhone and the software-ization of all buttons. Buttons were seen as the enemy, inflexible blackberry relics of the 1990s. Tesla took this trend and ran with it, and many other cars, like my 2008 Prius, had already begun with their incredibly crappy touch-screen. Mine broke years ago and the audio is ENTIRELY on the front-right speaker. It can not be changed ever because ONLY the touch screen can change sound balance and touch screen's broken. Welp, at least my co-pilot has ideal audio?
My spouse has a 2019 Honda HRV and I hate dealing with the touchscreen while driving. It's cognitively very difficult to do the degree of fine motor control and visual attention the touchscreen requires while also driving safely. It's actually a little terrifying.
I remember reading an article a while back about some manufacturer, can't remember which one, adding a clickable knob to control the "smart" functions. Since so much of what we use a touchscreen for is actually menu selection, that could cover most of what we need to "touch".
Always seemed like a cargo cult: iphone good; touch good; buttons bad (steve said).
Let’s hope it’s a new trend! I love that my Audi still has tactile buttons and wheels, and was a big factor in choosing it. My previous car had a touch screen and it was so dangerous having to brace my hand for accuracy and stare at my fingers while driving.
even on phones it's "bad", it requires high focus.. it's was only good in the theory that smartphones would be used for prolonged dedicated tasks. how i miss blind use of buttons on old dumbphones
I share your feelings. I had to buy a newer phone and I pinned the 3 buttons to the bottom of the screen where I used to have the buttons on the bezel. The screen is at least 2 cm / 1 inch too tall anyway. The alternative is swiping to go back, which is unusable.
Sometimes the buttons disappear but bringing them back is not as complicated as I feared. Of course it's worse than having them. I'd take a 3 cm shorter screen and 1 cm bottom bezel with buttons.
It's good on phones because it allows them to become multi-tools. You can't have physical buttons for every thing any app might want to do; with a touch screen they can make their own buttons.
On cars it's silly. Cars are not multi-tools; they have a finite set of dedicated functions. Even for functions that benefit from a large high-res screen (maps, music library browsing, etc.), the actual input requirements are narrow enough to work with physical controls. Just look at the original iPod.
To be honest, if I had a droid 4 with the specs of my pixel 3a I would probably not purchase another phone for a decade. I loved the slide-out physical keyboard on the droid line.
It was never a cargo cult of being good... it was a cost cutting play that they correctly thought they could shove down consumers throats. Glad to see Honda acting on behalf of the driver again.
How could it not be cheaper? No molds (or just one bezel mold), far less industrial design, fewer individual wires. Not to mention the QA requirements for testing buttons vs a virtual screen.
I admit I am completely oblivious to those details. Quite interesting. I'd think 5-6 rolling dials and 3-4 buttons in total are still cheaper than a 8" touchscreen but apparently I was wrong.
They're probably cheaper at the small scale - big panel big price - but at the large scale might not be so cheap: Now you have a point of failure for each of those dials/buttons, the housing is more complex/expensive, you need to make replacement parts for all of those buttons, etc. More training for repair technicians, more parts they have to keep in stock. Possibly more damaged phones because each button is a weak point in the phone's housing.
Screen costs trended down pretty aggressively over time so over the course of a couple years it probably ended up being cost-effective even if it wasn't at day 1. If you're already throwing a relatively sizable high-quality panel into your phone making it a bit bigger may not be as much of a bump up in price.
Touchscreens are massively massively cheaper. Especially for products with warranties like cars. Thing fucks up, just swap out the entire brain+display unit.
Still loved all my physical buttons which made input a breeze and didnt require constantly correcting my dang text, in a phone context, nah, he's still wrong; maybe a hybrid is even better, but amorphous movement and inferring intent is not a great user experience as things get more complex.
Mine don't. They've only ever really had tablets, and I just recently got a Pi for one of them to learn physical touch typing on.
I'm always annoyed phone typing specifically because I can't do anything but focus on the damn on screen keyboard until the message is complete. I remember being able to write reams of text on my old cell with a pop out keyboard, or even with the T9 setup on a Nokia brick entirely by feel, and nigh-automatic.
I don't think I've ever communicated/operated as smoothly as When I have a haptic interface to work with. That even comes down to learning unfamiliar interfaces too. With a strictly defined series of controls to be actuated in a particular order, I tend to be able to permute and learn faster when I have some level of feel to work with.
Instead you get a phone that can get wet, that the charging port doesn’t break after a year, and that has enough memory to not need to use an sdcard (I bought a good brand sdcard from a reliable retailer, and it fucked out in the phone: I would never make that mistake again).
I love equipment I can hack and fix myself, but I love reliable equipment more.
For 10 years I had smart phones, this was never the reason for breaking. I know that there are people who constantly break theirs, but I don't take my phone to shower.
> that the charging port doesn’t break after a year
That has nothing to do with it, micro USB had this failure and looks that USB-C is much more durable, if they opted for mini USB (which is pretty much the same size as micro USB, we wouldn't this problem at all).
> and that has enough memory to not need to use an sdcard (I bought a good brand sdcard from a reliable retailer, and it fucked out in the phone: I would never make that mistake again).
Not sure what you did, but I never had that experience. Not even sure how an sdcard can fuck up a phone.
Only correct in a "whatever people buy is good, and people buy iPhones so everything they do is right" sense. Hardware keyboards on phones still are faster to type on than even the best swipe keyboard, and they work through gloves (rather relevant now in these wear-gloves, wash-your-hands days).
Of course, optimizing for WPM over other factors is not right for all customers. But a car is definitely not a phone, so.
How do you feel about the MMI scroll wheel? I don’t feel safe using that either; it still requires eyes on the screen to see what you’re selecting. Even my passengers, who can give it their full attention, are routinely stymied by the process of pairing their phones for Bluetooth audio playback.
At least I can get the volume and temperature knobs by feel.
I think there can be a balance between physical controls for actions that need to and will often be used while driving, and touch controls for stuff that you will most likely use when standing still.
Controlling the temperature or music volume will be done while driving so they should be actual buttons that your muscle memory will reach with no mental effort or distraction. Adjusting the suspension settings or typing in a GPS address can be done via a touchscreen since it's unlikely you'll do it on the move and touch offers a better experience for this.
yes, that's the best split--make frequently-used features and/or features used primarily while driving physical controls, while rarely-used features and/or features used while parked can be touch-based.
however, address input should be primarily by voice control rather than touch entry. changing destinations (for whatever reason) mid-drive on a navigation system is dangerous and somewhat common, and voice control is the best option for keeping your eyes on the road (absent a passenger who can do the touchscreen data entry).
Whats interesting about Honda going with a dial, is that they designed, what I thought, was a pretty brilliant absolutely positioned touchpad for Acura. Have peopled used these, what is there feedback. It seems much more natural, intuitive, and fast compared to a dial.
Lexus also has a touchpad, and an interesting "tactile joystick" type of solution. Takes some getting used to but the tactile feedback goes a long way to reducing the need to look at the screen.
I think the MMI interface, in one specific generation (the one just before they introduced the touchscreen, where the four-corner buttons were dropped), has one big advantage: you learn the amount of clicks things are away.
It's been over a year since I had an Audi A3 with the system, but I still remember that going from anywhere to Android Auto would be pressing home, then just giving the wheel a big turn clockwise, then back one click counter-clockwise and confirm. You got used to the common operations, and you could do them blindly after a while. In a moving car, a touchscreen is almost always problematic because you need to see if your finger is going the right direction to compensate for car movements.
I mean, it certainly isn’t perfect at all. It has the down side that you are invited to stare at the screen. But if I’m disciplined, I can get away with a click-glance approach to adjusting things, which is still better than the multi-second hover I had to do with the touchscreen.
I always assumed companies were drawn to it not just because of the trendiness but because engineering and general development of these features are faster, cheaper, and easier to fix compared to dealing with physical parts (e.g. knobs, wiring).
Audi may be doing some things right (I love the location of the audio volume knob), it doesn't compensate for that ridiculous touch pad which you're supposed to use to enter street names by writing the characters one by one with your finger... and many other UI warts.
The best thing about Audi's console is that fact that they support Apple CarPlay.
I'm young and I love tech, but I'd rather feel for the volume control knob while I'm watching the road than stare at a touch screen and try to position my finger to hit an icon in a moving car. Those interfaces were just a terrible idea.
In my brother's old Prius it would randomly switch to a diagram showing how cool its power train system was/energy transfer etc. Just what I need while I'm driving - a useless distraction which I have to close before I get access to the controls I need!
(I don't remember exactly how it worked though because I haven't driven it in a while.)
I haven't seen any stats, but anecdotally, I remember watching TopGear episodes a decade ago where they would go on about how Hondas were boring "old people" cars. Its funny because in my region on the US Hondas are very popular with young people hot-rodding them up.
> Honda has done what no other car maker is doing,
Huh? The author is not familiar with Mazda - their latest models of the CX line (possibly others) have full control of the interface with a very functional physical knob / dial along with other tactile controls.
Also, the headline is a bit misleading - they aren't removing touchscreen controls entirely - only removing them from "some" controls as their preface text indicates, which to be clear is solely A/C controls.
I have a Mazda from 2019 (not the CX), and I can do everything with a couple of knobs. Even the extra buttons you mention (volume up/down in the wheel or quick access to media/navigation/radio in the center console) are redundant and nearly useless. Just a couple of weeks after I got the car, I have never touched the screen again.
A/C controls are completely manual. Mazda got it right from the beginning.
Yes, thank you. I was thinking the exact same thing. I was positive I read an article last year about how Mazda was doing away with touchscreens. I think someone just pasted the Mazda article above.
All touchscreens provide zero tactile feedback or spatial info about its setting. Thus to use any touchscreen, you always must take your eyes off the road to look at it. Thus no matter how logical or attractive or fast the display, screens are always less safe than any tactile alternative control that lets you keep your eyes on the road.
Also, for car devices that provide intuitive feedback on their activity (wiper motion, fan noise, air temperature from outlets, audio volume, etc), you don't need a screen to confirm that it has changed.
And since these devices are the ones that I change most often (and music), I'd much prefer to control them on the steering wheel or verbally, and never use a screen.
I buy cheaper cars, because I don't really care about any of the high-end features that cars offer, and this has been one legitimate advantage, at least as of the last time I was shopping; cheap cars cheaped out on the display, so they still had physical controls for things like volume. I hope this trend takes off before I buy another.
I think it would be possible to make a decent touch screen, but it seems like the only people who give even a quantum of a damn about latency are the video game folks. A UI with 95th-percentile or 99th-percentile multi-second latency is an active hazard on the road, even if it is normally acceptable, which itself is fairly rare and expensive.
Touchscreens CAN BE DONE RIGHT. (or at least better)
I have an aftermarket JVC headunit in my 2003 VW. It has one button, that's the "Menu" button on single press, or Power button when held.
The screen itself is relatively intuitive to control without looking because of a gesture feature it has as well as button placement being useful.
If I want more volume I put one finger on the screen and make a circle gesture in the clockwise direction. Down is counter-clockwise. The play/pause button is in the very bottom right so you can find the button with feel. You can shuffle songs with another gesture (though I never use it).
I really like my touchscreen. And every time I am using a work vehicle (Ford Explorers), or my wife's GMC Sierra, I hate the controls because you have to look up to see what you're doing. Thankfully their steeringwheel controls are generally good.
there is a place for both kinds of controls. frequently used functions (volume, climate controls) should have physical buttons. infrequently used functions (like reset tire pressure monitoring) is best hidden in a touchscreen menu.
Another fad that should go away is blue light dashboards. They give horrible afterimages in dark conditions. BMW's red-orange lights are so relaxing to look at in comparison.
If a car uses blue dash lights, that will stop me from buying it instantly and unquestionably. Blue is extremely saturating to my eyes' receptors and uncomfortable to look at in darkness even for a moment. Red is 100x more forgiving.
Unfortunately we won't get this car in the US. I love my 1st gen Honda Fit and plan to keep it pretty much forever, they're such a great vehicle. Incredible gas mileage and they're actually fun to drive with the short wheelbase. In tune with the article I put the only Carplay receiver with a physical volume knob in it and it's perfectly easy to use.
I gotta say... I got a Fit in 2007, pre-ordered before they were available, and at 300k+ miles it's doing great. The guy at the oil change place literally turned his eyes to the heavens and said that he couldn't find any service to recommend. He'd never seen a car of such age that clean; it should surely be leaking something.
I've heard Honda has gone downhill in the last decade, and my next car probably won't be a Honda. But at this rate, my next car will drive itself. (Especially since I'm no longer putting miles on it at the rate that got me to 300k in a decade.)
Good. Touch screen controls are a good tool for communicating visual information while having some way to still give users some controls. Tactile controls are good tools for when the operator needs to visually focus on something else and feedback can be sensed in other ways. For cars, the only visual information it should show to the driver are either things that are controlled outside of a touch screen (speedometer, tach) or can't be controlled while the vehicle is in operation anyway (oil temp gauge, etc). Everything else can be intuitively sensed by the driver's other senses and the important part of the control is the feedback saying that you are in fact manipulating the controls properly.
Me in my bit older Mercedes, my gears, lights, whipers all go automatic, im left with radio control and temperature. Audios is easy, it on the steering wheel, so is answering the phone. Two knobs for warm/cold and airco. No need for touchscreen.
This is a great decision by Honda. Touchscreens are a terrible UX when driving. Its difficult to be accurate with the touchscreen in a car when its moving, even as the passenger. Physical controls are much easier to control, less distracting, and we develop muscle memory for knobs dials and switches easily.
As an example, I personally am not a fan of the extreme minimalism in Tesla cars. A fully touchscreen experience makes sense only after a car is capable of fully autonomous self driving. As long as a human is responsible for controlling/monitoring the car, physical controls are better than touch controls.
To be fair, touch screens are better for changing settings, monitoring the health of the car, and any other action that we do while the car is parked.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] threadTouch screen controls in automotive environment is such a bad idea (unless the vehicle is stationary, and even then...)
Touch screen controls are a bad idea in general when the form factor has space for adequate physical controls.
The only time they're an acceptable compromise is for small devices like phones. Even then careful use of a small number of buttons can be a great improvement.
It's fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car. This is a feature that would never need to be operated while the vehicle is in motion, and likely wouldn't be configured more than once by any given owner.
Features like this are more than adequately served by touchscreen controls. Really, you would have a worse UI if there was a hardware slider for this on the dash.
But yes, all controls that a driver would want to use while the vehicle is in motion should be controllable with hardware controls that can be located and operated tactilely.
Features like that could be implemented as dipswitches/etc hidden in a compartment under the hood, or not at all. The "configuration screen with a gazillion tweakable settings" thing has generally fallen out of favor in desktop and mobile software, and I expect the car industry will eventually catch up.
How is this an improvement over having it on a touch screen?
Touchscreens aren't necessary for any of that, though. There are alternative, better UI interfaces. For instance: f-key driven soft menus. Those have tactile feedback, have reliable key-press detection, and can be operated with regular gloves.
The only situation in a car where I could see a touchscreen being the right option are cases where a soft keyboard is needed.
> It's fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car.... Features like this are more than adequately served by touchscreen controls.
My Honda has a button-operated menu for that, and that's better than a touchscreen.
> you would have a worse UI if there was a hardware slider for this on the dash.
I never said that cars should have a dedicated, physical control for each function. What I said was touchscreens are unnecessary and sub-optimal.
Commonly used functions should have dedicated physical controls, especially those that are likely to be used while in motion (driving controls, climate control, basic audio stuff). The next most common set of functions should be implemented with a combination of shortcut keys and f-keys. Finally, seldom-used functions (such as configuration) should be accessed with f-key driven menus.
Some automakers (Mazda, BMW) use a knob instead, which makes it a bit quicker to scroll through a longer list, but I have found myself overshooting and then having to back track which is sometimes annoying.
There's really pros and cons to whatever implementation is used. While I completely agree that any function that might be operated while driving needs to be able to be operable with hard controls, I also don't think it's a good idea to clutter those menus with a bunch of junk that you don't want or need while driving.
I think there's a good case to be made for 3 levels of controls:
* Things that must have dedicated hard keys: anything that must be adjusted rapidly for driver attentiveness, control, or comfort -- HVAC, audio levels and basic tuning, all lighting and vehicle controls.
* Things that must have hard keys, but can live in a shared menu: anything that a driver may want to adjust while driving, but is not essential for immediate use -- trip data, infotainment, non-critical gauge monitoring etc.
* Things that don't need hard keys and should not clutter any of the above interfaces: odd-ball configuration settings that a driver would not need to operate while driving -- key fob configuration, entry-exit preference configuration, software updates, integrations with external services, maintenance logs, etc.
A more in-depth article last year on why Mazda is doing this.
https://carsalesbase.com/us-mazda/
https://www.autonews.com/sales/mazdas-complicated-journey-pr...
The CX-5 is at the higher end of their starting prices, too. They have the Mazda3, CX-3, CX-30 and Mazda6 that are all cheaper base.
And to be sure, Mazda's crossovers look much better than Honda or Toyota - at least Toyota finally refreshed their interiors two years ago to look like something other than 2003 era.
Anyone with a lick of business sense would happily trade -10% sales volume for +60% profit from higher margins. They didn't price themselves out, they just decided to not play the loss-leader volume game Ford/Honda/Toyota is playing.
https://money.cnn.com/quote/financials/financials.html?symb=...
EDIT: $1.1B in 2016. In 2015 net income was $1.45B :-(
Every shareholder report in the last couple years stated that their premium offerings are doing better than they expected and they're making more money than they expected given the capex.
You stated that they make 60% more money. If the point you are trying to make is that they make 60% more than they expected, I won't argue with you.
Mazda raised their margin target to ~10% per vehicle, which is pretty standard for the premium segment. Which if they performed to expectations, would mean 40% more profit; they're slightly overperforming at ~60%.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335
So while most other companies only implemented touchscreen controls for secondary features Honda did it for the most widely used one. Now they are backtracking 100%, go figure.
ETA:
Non-USA interior: https://img.sm360.ca/images/article/the-honda-way/58810//the...
USA interior: https://file.kelleybluebookimages.com/kbb/base/evox/StJ/1082...
The issue with new Hondas is that switching off/on the air conditioning, or air flow/fan speed, has to be done via touch screen. They do have dials for temperature control and a button to bring up the Climate UI.
I had a text conversation with my GF back and forth for almost two hours, just by using the speech to text recognition capability of the Sync in my Fiesa, it was really amazing to me how well it worked.
My 2016 Toyota Corolla has something similar and pairs with my iphone and its a total nightmare. it takes literally ten minutes for it to sync up. That's after the phone has already been connected via Bluetooth. The command queries don't often work, you have to repeat them several times, and then after three of four times of saying the same thing over and over, you finally just give up. I'm not sure if its just with the iphone, but it really does suck.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if that were heavily dependent on the quality of the car's audio system, though; I went for the best available trim package, figuring that if I had to go back to owning a car again then it might as well at least be as comfortable as I could manage, and I might not have so good an experience here if I had economized a bit more.
Using Siri is more dangerous than driving and texting:
"Undistracted drivers typically showed a one-second reaction time. Those who used the voice-controlled Apple CarPlay saw a 36% increase in their reaction time, which rose to 57% when they used the touch interface."
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/03/20/new-study-shows-u...
Touchscreens should be banned in cars. I bought my car without any for that reason.
Passengers are largely not helping, and certainly are not good at communicating problems.
You're likely keeping your eyes on the road more with voice control over texting, though this one is hard to compare as the studies didn't measure it quite the same. Voice controls all came in under the NHTSA 12 second recommendation. The texting study showed an increase in time spent looking away from the road from a baseline of 10% to 40%.
Original Studies: https://iamwebsite.blob.core.windows.net/media/docs/default-...
https://www.racfoundation.org/assets/rac_foundation/content/...
Even human to human level, every safety critical application rely on voice commands has to implement very rigid and strong standards and rules on human speech.
Ideally, all controls would be available on the steering wheel without removing either hand. Or, as you say, voice controls.
Humans have pretty good spatial reasoning (proprioception); the notion that touch controls should replace tactile well-spaced controls is dependent on the fact that both senses (sight, spatial awareness) are uncontested.
I would argue the point that sight is already in-use and must not be interfered with, if there's an alternative that does not use the same resources.
I think of it like hardware acceleration and parrelelisation; the brain has a hardware accelerator for sight, but only one, and has a bunch of cores ready for other tasks, and those other tasks can happen in parallel.
https://images.app.goo.gl/KdEV4qWFEHouDEq28
Yes. Most drivers are able to drive using one hand for a short period of time. Not so with eyes off the road.
In fact, it's a requirement in most countries where stick shift is the norm.
Also my steering wheel has both. I can do everything by feeling without my eyes leaving the road.
I really, really love to drive, I think I'm one of the few Europeans who chose to drive from Eastern Europe till the Atlantic Coast and back for his vacation just because I like driving (and wanted to see how Europe actually looks like outside of the big cities), and as such I can tell you that lack of attention (i.e. not seeing where you go and not seeing how the people around you are going) is the number one factor of accidents. I think there's nothing else that comes close to it.
Because they suck at recognition.
I've noticed the mental effort I spend in trying to formulate a voice command that the car (or even phone) will understand is significant - and that almost none of my brain is being used for driving. The likelihood of it not recognizing what I said is not low. With tactile buttons, it's almost automatic. I don't spend any time thinking. I know where the buttons are, and my finger is good at finding it.
On the few occasions where I'm not sure where my finger landed, I can still slowly move my finger to an edge and start counting. I can do this over several seconds. Often while doing this I have to attend to an event on the road, and it's trivial to do so: I pause my finger search, attend to the event on the road, and then resume. So even if it takes 10-30s to find my button (very rare), it can be done with almost no loss of attention on the road. The same goes if I need to pause to listen/respond to what someone else in the car is saying.
Contrast that with voice recognition: If I have to pause to attend to anything on the road, the recognition system assumes I'm done talking. This adds more mental stress (maybe it will execute the wrong command? In any case I'll have to start over).
Now I'll go further and make an even stronger claim: Even if voice recognition becomes almost perfect (better than humans), it will still be a greater cognitive load to use voice recognition. For me, changing stations on the radio or adjusting the volume or adjusting the climate control is pretty automatic. The cognitive load of finding the preset station is virtually none. Whereas just formulating the command verbally - even to another human where I wouldn't worry about voice recognition - takes more effort. Perhaps verbal skills are tied to the vision in the brain and tactile senses are not? I wonder if any studies have been done on this.
If you forced me to have them, I'd prefer something like a d-pad on each side because they are easy to locate without looking and intuitive to select. Critical controls should be stalks, IMHO. I can't use cruise control in the car I've owned for six years without looking at the steering wheel, but I test drove a Subaru, which I haven't owned for like 9 years, and immediately remembered how to operate the cruise stalk.
"Undistracted drivers typically showed a one-second reaction time. Those who used the voice-controlled Apple CarPlay saw a 36% increase in their reaction time, which rose to 57% when they used the touch interface."
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/03/20/new-study-shows-u...
Any car needs to be connected to a central server where the processing occurs. Useful levels of voice recognition just aren't going to happen inside the car.
And if you added a semicolon-keyword like "over" for radio, you'd avoid the issue where it waits a minute to see if you finished, making usage agonizingly slow.
But we somehow still haven't reached the point where people/corps finally realize that we simply can't parse natural language effectively
However, I do feel HUD display tech is one area in which could do with some love as would compliment and be less distracting over a screen located away from the drivers view of vision.
They all suck and they’re literally not workable for rentals. Nobody will waste an hour configuring a rental car’s VA on departure.
I also un-pair all the hundreds of paired bluetooth phones, if the reset hasn’t already done that. I often rent cars where the address book is full of names and numbers from previously paired phones.
It has few functions like call X or go to Y but in my experience, it doesn't do that many things but makes them very well.
To complicate things, the rental agency had bound the two key fobs together with steel cable. This caused the car to arbitrarily recall the user settings from one key or the other--presumably whichever key it happened to recognize first. This had the effect of making the system behave even more randomly as it unevenly switched back and forth between the two user profiles each time I started the car. Every time I'd think I had tamed the user preferences, the "other" set would get loaded, changing the preferences. I solved this by removing the key battery from one of the keys but even with just a single profile, it was a remarkably trying experience and one that seemed to have been engineered for frivolous, show-offy, reasons rather than solid, task-solving reasons.
Mercedes-Benz has, in recent years, also made their UX very flashy and fiddly even though they are not using a touch screen. Just tuning a radio station is a multi-step process requiring the traversal of several menus but lacking the feedback in the sub-menus that is needed to let the user know they have actually made a selection. The user must come back all the way to the top of the menu structure to see if the selection they made two or three steps earlier has had any effect.
Just give me a dedicated knob.
Who wants to know you water temperature measured to a 0.5degC accuracy?
Showing off without sense, basically.
Newer Suburus are almost as bad. Tesla is too but at least it's all located on one panel.
This is pretty surprising/disappointing, considering that the /s/ sound is pretty distinct, and considering that I did the "hey Siri" training when I got my phone.
There are multiple points of failures for a voice-control only interface for a high-speed moving vehicle:
1. Problems with NLP, and needing to adjust oneself to the proprietary format of this particular car's voice recognition grammar/syntax/parsing/etc. (discussed elsewhere in this thread)
2. Loud location (driving by a jackhammer)
3. Female voices [1]
4. AAVE voices [2]
5. Immigrant voices [1]
Some argument can be made that 3-5 could be improved on with larger training sets. Given that we're still working off of much of the same recording equipment that we developed in the early 20th century, this is only true up to a point in regards to #3, since it's difficult to calibrate higher pitched "noise" out and keep higher pitched voices in when they're at a similar range.
Even assuming all the above problems are solved, there are still the cases of someone losing their voice temporarily due to illness, or someone speech-disabled but otherwise able-bodied, and the cases of a computer malfunction in the car itself that causes voice recognition to break. I was in such an incident myself quite recently, where a rented Mini Cooper's onboard computer made it appear that the engine was overheating (red hot engine symbol) and that I must cease driving immediately lest the car explodes. After the car was off, the computer malfunctioned so severely that attempting to turn the car on only resulted in a light-up display of every error message the car had.
All that to say - voice controls are not a suitable replacement for standard knobs and dials, and the latter should always be available as a reliable back-up method for operating a car.
[1] - https://hbr.org/2019/05/voice-recognition-still-has-signific... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...
Not only does it indeed have buttons, but good buttons as well. Clicky where needed, rubbery where appropriate, with the righ amount of resistance etc.
Just like the iPhone always has the nicest buttons of any phone. It's a little thing that makes using it a pleasure.
https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/honda/fit/2013/photos-in...
[1] https://www.autocar.co.uk/sites/autocar.co.uk/files/styles/g...
What if there are legitimate arguments for both and it's good that there's both options available?
That's why there are so many high-end phones with lots of buttons.
not really the metrics for high-end phones
What if you made one?
Both lacks the tactile feedback buttons are offering, both don't work with gloves and both requires you to look at the display (and stop looking at the road) to know what action you're making.
Most modern car interior controls are horrible (Tesla’s giant laggy touchscreen included).
Also, whenever you are starting a sentence such as "In what circumstance..." and making blanket assertions, it's better to take a step back and question if other people's circumstances are radically different from yours. That's what good product thinking is about.
Not everyone wants to.
Geotagging pictures is a very important use case for a professional photographer, and relying on the user to provide GPS through another device is not advisable.
Also phone location services may not work very well without a cell signal, and not everyone takes photos only within range of a cell tower.
A cellular radio in a laptop gets access to better antennas and a vastly larger battery than what's found in a smartphone.
More likely that the executives above them who are watching what sells and what doesn't are.
I had many reservations about the touchscreen prior to ownership, however I don't really have any complaints now. You get used to it, Tesla's specifically is not laggy, and most critical stuff is on the steering wheel/stalk anyway.
This is false, full stop.
It also allows updates and changes after the car is in production.
Munro and Associates is a company that does reverse engineering and costing work and it's wildly interesting to learn about: https://jalopnik.com/the-fascinating-company-that-tears-cars...
They've done a pretty good job at it too, but it needs to be customizable to be great. If I ordered the surround camera option, I want that to be easy to access, not buried a few gestures deep. Chrysler nailed it, they let you rearrange the touch screen icons and have a bar along the bottom where you can put items that are always visible. They also have more buttons and dials.
Shouldn't it just automatically show the surround camera when I am in reverse or in some parking mode? I feel like that could be a setting or a soft button that appears when appropriate.
For the past couple years, US law requires that they default to the backup camera when in reverse (which is dumb, but that's another discussion). At least surround view is only one tap from there. Other manufacturers still do this better by showing both the backup camera AND the surround cameras at the same time and the Volvo screen is plenty large enough to handle this since other manufacturers with smaller screens do it well.
It should do it in parking mode, but it doesn't! The car even switches to a top view illustration of the car to show you the ultrasonic sensor readings when you're close to stuff (ie. when you're parking) but it doesn't turn the surround cameras on!
Before laws mandated the use of seat belts, most people didn't use them. My mother bought a Volvo 122 in the 1960s, and people marvelled at the three-point harness.
But it's not like US manufacturers rushed to take advantage of Volvo making the patents freely available, and nor did Volvo take over the world by storm.
Some cars had alarms that nagged the driver if the seat belts weren't done up. I recall my uncle routed around this by looping the driver and "shotgun" belts -behind- the seats and fastening them.
Left to their own devices, large numbers of people prefer convenience and low price to safety. Only by regulation did the mass market adopt safer cars.
So I completely agree, no, people did not like wearing seat belts. They only did so when their option to forgo safety was removed.
p.s. I recall watching this PSA in Ontario. Everyone laughed about it, but soooooo many young men then went out and drove their muscle cars sans belt. Enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sri9j3PA5vE
The same thing happened with 3DTVs -- the manufacturers all decided this was the next big thing, and shifted all their production to it, and it turns out.. it wasn't. But we as consumers had a 5-year drought where you simply couldn't buy a new TV that wasn't 3D. The same is happening with SmartTVs today -- if I want a new TV that isn't bottom-of-the-barrel tier, my only option is Smart.
When I got leased a VW Jetta a few years back, you had the option of no-touchscreen.. but that was the lowest-featured car, so you have up 10 other things for it.
You can also find the same thing in MacBooks with the touchbar -- once it was out, your only real options were to buy it, or throw the baby out and buy nothing/windows.
You can't judge whether customers like them, because it's bundled to other far more valuable aspects.
That way, if there is a software update; and there is a new feature it can be mapped to a button by the user in the way that they want.
Agreed, this is the end game.
The original CTS (circa 2003) did this. It had four buttons and a rotary dial on the steering wheel that you could assign to the functions of your choosing. This was a groundbreaking usability enhancement at the time. They also had a dial on the ceiling for the sunroof where you just turn it to the position you want the sunroof to open to (ex. 50%) and then the sunroof would open that amount. It was brilliantly simple and elegant.
Unfortunately, Cadillac went in reverse for a number of years afterwards... dropping the customizable buttons, dropping the sunroof dial, making touchsensative (but not actually tactile) physical controls. Finally, this year they have gone back to real tactile controls!
BMW has been using assignable buttons for over a decade now. I loved having one button to go to my favorite radio station, another button to call my wife, another to set the nav system to navigate home. The buttons are also sensitive to resistive touch, so if you put your finger on the button without actually pushing it, it will tell you on the screen what that button has been assigned to. I think BMW does tactile controls better than any other car I've owned. Not that many BMW owners use them, but even the signal light wand is a delight for tactile senses.
There may be other automakers who do the assignable button thing too, would love to hear from anyone who knows of others.
I was a little disappointed in the controls in the new volvo I bought last year. They have a mix of touchscreen controls and a limited number of tactile buttons and knobs. They got really close to getting it right. They at least need to make the screen configurable so you can put your most used functions on the home screen.
Fiat-Chrysler got this right at least. Their UConnect system has a system bar along the bottom of the screen that is always visible and you can decide which buttons you want there (heated steering wheel control, surround cameras, etc). If I wanted to bring up the surround cameras on the Volvo as I'm pulling into a parking space, I'd have to swipe right, tap cameras, then switch the surround view, with slight UI delays in between each of these gestures -- not ideal when pulling into a parking space. BMW (and the new Corvette C8) have a dedicated tactile button for this, Chrysler lets you put that "button" on the home row of the touchscreen... both are much better solutions.
Hopefully the automakers are coming out of a learning phase right now and things are about to get much better as everyone has tried terrible touchscreens and learned why there needs to be more buttons.
Its like people who insist on working with dvorak in a company but much worse.
Most people who drive would prefer to be insulated from the activity as much as is legally possible. Fly-by-wire everything, touch interfaces, etc. This is how you achieve that objective. These "innovations" are obviously the antithesis of safe. But, we all know money is more important than safety, and most consumers are attracted exclusively to this kind of shiny bullshit.
Digital cameras are increasingly a niche product that exist mainly to cater to people who specifically want a the "SLR" user experience. If you just want to take decent enough photos, your smartphone's camera today is better than most prosumer DSLRs from like five years ago.
I don't think today's DSLRs have the form factor that they have because it's objectively more usable. It's just the form factor that their self-selected customers want. One piece of evidence in favor of that is that all DSLRs do have big LCD screens on the back and often require a lot of menu diving to access any functionality that didn't exist in cameras before the digital revolution.
There's still a physical dial for switching modes even though that's not something you actually change that often. Meanwhile you often have to dig into a menu or go through crappy buttons to do things like delete a photo.
I won't go so far as to describe it as fetishization, because I think that's unfairly critical. But I do think a camera UX designed from first principles purely for usability would not have the same physical controls as a typical DSLR.
So on my seven year old Nikon D3s I can use buttons to focus and change the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, WB, focusing mode and focus selection point all the while keeping my eye to the viewfinder. I would almost never look at the rear screen except to check the always-on histogram if the lighting radically changed. This means I can react instantly during a sequence of shots without even thinking about the menu system. It is not just 'what I want' but a massive amount of directly accessible usability and configurability. Going into the menu system would almost never be necessary during a typical shoot.
The D850 I recently upgraded to is pretty much the same. I use the live-view screen on the D850 when shooting video but use the viewfinder and buttons (as above) when shooting stills.
And, to the original point of the discussion, these cameras also have lots of physical buttons and dials which are nice to have when they're properly designed.
Sure, and you could do that with an SLR from the 90s too, as I recall.
Camera manufacturers are very innovative when it comes to capabilities and new features, but incredibly conservative when it comes to user experience and form factor.
> they also still have buttons and dials everywhere. ... The reason is obvious: when you're taking photos, you don't want to be looking down at a screen
I agree that physical affordances are very useful. But I don't think the cause of DSLRs having them is because current manufacturers believe buttons have superior usability. It's because SLRs have had those same controls since before touchscreens existed and today's self-selected DSLR camera audience specifically wants products with that "vintage" user experience.
My evidence is that today's cameras generally only have hardware controls for features that existed since before the digital revolution. Purely new capabilities (like file management) have not included corresponding new hardware controls. Likewise, hardware controls that are no longer that useful, like mode selectors, are still present.
To me, this implies that camera manufacturers are not just trying to provide a "hardware control" UX, they are specifically providing "the hardware control UX of 90s SLRs".
(So that you don’t guess, I mean when photographing the back of my head or the inside of a tight crawl space when my cat got inside.)
Cameras aren't really like that. Nowadays if you've actually bought a camera as opposed to just using the one in your phone you're probably at least a little bit into photography, and in that context the function matters more than the form and style.
[1] I'll grant that cost, along with simplicity of reconfiguration via software, may also be factors.
It's no coincidence that the company with most manufacturing issues - Tesla - also went with completely touchscreen based cabin with pretty much no additional cost. This is further confirmed by the fact that they didn't offset the screen issue by installing a projected HUD display (which is these days available in most 20.000$ cars) - it's complicated to install.
Much easier to justify the extra cost of switches when you know your customers will happily pay a premium for them.
And since you ask, you get that 10k or more back in gas savings. On top of that there are other benefits, some of them objective and monetary such as resale value ($), safety ($$$), environmental responsibility, longevity of the car ($$), fun, and speed. So, yes. You should test drive one and see what it feels like.
And that’s just comparing to gas cars. Comparing to competing electric cars would be a different list of benefits.
Ohhhh no no it is waaaay different because I make the lights that you don’t. Yes sometimes get stuck in traffic but not nearly as much. I can observe speed limits and still be way ahead of you because of the acceleration speed (quickness). Acceleration ability also means being able to keep longer follow distance in traffic without losing chances to pass safely when they open up.
Way prefer the Mazda / Honda direction of moving back to switchgear. It looks and functions better, it can be discretely repaired and replaced by a normal person, and so forth.
Then you could delete the buttons you don't use, and make the ones you do use really big, with cool pictures, and funny sounds when you touched them.
HyperCard Adventures (hypercardadventures.com):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19237052
https://hypercardadventures.com/
Nobody bothers to write sales copy saying "You can actually change the cabin temperature and the radio volume on this car"
Those supposed manufacturing issues are outdated rumors from the early days of the production lines when they were getting off the ground.
>went with completely touchscreen based cabin
Absolutely false. There are plenty of buttons and other physical controls in easy reach on the steering wheel and in other convenient and sensible places. As well as optional (you don’t need them) voice controls. It’s not “completely” anything based.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB78NXH77s4
Tactile feedback and quicker response time on certain actions is amazing, and just using the camera is a blast.
My 2014 mazda has some touch functions, but the main radio controls and the entire climate interface are all still knobs and buttons. The clock is separate from the entertainment screen. I love it!
https://techxplore.com/news/2020-03-car-audio-pose-greater-d...
I remember reading an article a while back about some manufacturer, can't remember which one, adding a clickable knob to control the "smart" functions. Since so much of what we use a touchscreen for is actually menu selection, that could cover most of what we need to "touch".
Let’s hope it’s a new trend! I love that my Audi still has tactile buttons and wheels, and was a big factor in choosing it. My previous car had a touch screen and it was so dangerous having to brace my hand for accuracy and stare at my fingers while driving.
Sometimes the buttons disappear but bringing them back is not as complicated as I feared. Of course it's worse than having them. I'd take a 3 cm shorter screen and 1 cm bottom bezel with buttons.
On cars it's silly. Cars are not multi-tools; they have a finite set of dedicated functions. Even for functions that benefit from a large high-res screen (maps, music library browsing, etc.), the actual input requirements are narrow enough to work with physical controls. Just look at the original iPod.
This is why the cursor keys exist, also keybindings
humans can learn how to make most important and quick features easily
Screen costs trended down pretty aggressively over time so over the course of a couple years it probably ended up being cost-effective even if it wasn't at day 1. If you're already throwing a relatively sizable high-quality panel into your phone making it a bit bigger may not be as much of a bump up in price.
That said, a huge factor is assembly, maintaince, and repair.
Might not be intuitive to us, but it definitely is to them.
I'm always annoyed phone typing specifically because I can't do anything but focus on the damn on screen keyboard until the message is complete. I remember being able to write reams of text on my old cell with a pop out keyboard, or even with the T9 setup on a Nokia brick entirely by feel, and nigh-automatic.
I don't think I've ever communicated/operated as smoothly as When I have a haptic interface to work with. That even comes down to learning unfamiliar interfaces too. With a strictly defined series of controls to be actuated in a particular order, I tend to be able to permute and learn faster when I have some level of feel to work with.
I really hate those trends.
I love equipment I can hack and fix myself, but I love reliable equipment more.
For 10 years I had smart phones, this was never the reason for breaking. I know that there are people who constantly break theirs, but I don't take my phone to shower.
> that the charging port doesn’t break after a year
That has nothing to do with it, micro USB had this failure and looks that USB-C is much more durable, if they opted for mini USB (which is pretty much the same size as micro USB, we wouldn't this problem at all).
> and that has enough memory to not need to use an sdcard (I bought a good brand sdcard from a reliable retailer, and it fucked out in the phone: I would never make that mistake again).
Not sure what you did, but I never had that experience. Not even sure how an sdcard can fuck up a phone.
Of course, optimizing for WPM over other factors is not right for all customers. But a car is definitely not a phone, so.
Design =/= usability?
At least I can get the volume and temperature knobs by feel.
Controlling the temperature or music volume will be done while driving so they should be actual buttons that your muscle memory will reach with no mental effort or distraction. Adjusting the suspension settings or typing in a GPS address can be done via a touchscreen since it's unlikely you'll do it on the move and touch offers a better experience for this.
however, address input should be primarily by voice control rather than touch entry. changing destinations (for whatever reason) mid-drive on a navigation system is dangerous and somewhat common, and voice control is the best option for keeping your eyes on the road (absent a passenger who can do the touchscreen data entry).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScWOFtlLCyI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcKa9apjOX8
It's been over a year since I had an Audi A3 with the system, but I still remember that going from anywhere to Android Auto would be pressing home, then just giving the wheel a big turn clockwise, then back one click counter-clockwise and confirm. You got used to the common operations, and you could do them blindly after a while. In a moving car, a touchscreen is almost always problematic because you need to see if your finger is going the right direction to compensate for car movements.
The best thing about Audi's console is that fact that they support Apple CarPlay.
Using Apple Carplay is more dangerous than texting.
When you're not driving: irrelevant
Conclusion: CarPlay is better than the Audi system.
Elon says they drive themselves now though, so there’s that ;)
> Honda’s decision to return to physical controls will be popular with some - including, no doubt, its ageing owner base in the UK
Ageing? Is there some stat showing Honda owners are older than owners of other models? Or that young people aren't buying Hondas?
In my brother's old Prius it would randomly switch to a diagram showing how cool its power train system was/energy transfer etc. Just what I need while I'm driving - a useless distraction which I have to close before I get access to the controls I need!
(I don't remember exactly how it worked though because I haven't driven it in a while.)
Huh? The author is not familiar with Mazda - their latest models of the CX line (possibly others) have full control of the interface with a very functional physical knob / dial along with other tactile controls.
Also, the headline is a bit misleading - they aren't removing touchscreen controls entirely - only removing them from "some" controls as their preface text indicates, which to be clear is solely A/C controls.
A/C controls are completely manual. Mazda got it right from the beginning.
Also, for car devices that provide intuitive feedback on their activity (wiper motion, fan noise, air temperature from outlets, audio volume, etc), you don't need a screen to confirm that it has changed.
And since these devices are the ones that I change most often (and music), I'd much prefer to control them on the steering wheel or verbally, and never use a screen.
I think it would be possible to make a decent touch screen, but it seems like the only people who give even a quantum of a damn about latency are the video game folks. A UI with 95th-percentile or 99th-percentile multi-second latency is an active hazard on the road, even if it is normally acceptable, which itself is fairly rare and expensive.
Touchscreens CAN BE DONE RIGHT. (or at least better)
I have an aftermarket JVC headunit in my 2003 VW. It has one button, that's the "Menu" button on single press, or Power button when held.
The screen itself is relatively intuitive to control without looking because of a gesture feature it has as well as button placement being useful.
If I want more volume I put one finger on the screen and make a circle gesture in the clockwise direction. Down is counter-clockwise. The play/pause button is in the very bottom right so you can find the button with feel. You can shuffle songs with another gesture (though I never use it).
I really like my touchscreen. And every time I am using a work vehicle (Ford Explorers), or my wife's GMC Sierra, I hate the controls because you have to look up to see what you're doing. Thankfully their steeringwheel controls are generally good.
I've heard Honda has gone downhill in the last decade, and my next car probably won't be a Honda. But at this rate, my next car will drive itself. (Especially since I'm no longer putting miles on it at the rate that got me to 300k in a decade.)
As an example, I personally am not a fan of the extreme minimalism in Tesla cars. A fully touchscreen experience makes sense only after a car is capable of fully autonomous self driving. As long as a human is responsible for controlling/monitoring the car, physical controls are better than touch controls.
To be fair, touch screens are better for changing settings, monitoring the health of the car, and any other action that we do while the car is parked.