As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps). Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
> phones and tablets are familiar, so too should in-vehicle touchscreens.
This too is so weird to me. I get that you want users to recognize an interface. And that it should mimic how you use other things. But at least put them in context.
I hope other brands start following Mazda again for this choice.
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars.
You are viewing the 'need' from the end user perspective. That is likely not the driving force that is causing touch screen proliferation.
The likely driving force that is causing it is the manufacturers BOM costs.
A single, rectangular, touch screen, that can swallow up a bunch of different knobs and buttons and basic displays, is likely cheaper from an overall BOM perspective than the set of knobs and buttons and basic displays (and supporting material (mechanical and wiring) for those knobs/buttons/displays).
And, if two (or more) different car models use the same size rectangular screen, then one single "screen" can be used for plural models (with only software differences) vs. the need for unique moldings/buttons/etc. when providing the physical knobs and buttons on different models.
The touch screen also enables different "accessory classes" even within the same model by a software change vs. a different piece of hardware. Think basic hot/cold/manual blower speed climate control vs. higher end climate control where you set a specific temp and the system picks heat/cool/blower speed. The same single touch screen can provide both the 'basic' and the 'luxury' interface via a software change vs. two different physical control units inserted into the dash.
> The likely driving force that is causing it is the manufacturers BOM costs.
Whilst I think this is part of it's about more than just reducing the BOM. There's a trend to move all interfaces from knobs and switches to touch screens even when money isn't the problem. For example the SpaceX Dragon capsule also takes this approach which you can see from the images below:
A heavily vibrating vehicle which needs to be operated quickly and with 100% reliability by a human operator really should not be operated via a proliferation of touch screens and touch buttons as the images above show.
I think current fashions are very much to blame in a lot of cases. A sleek touchscreen operated car in the showroom is a sexier buy than your more traditional button festooned dashboard. Buyer's only get a chance to regret it after they've spent a lot of time with the vehicle.
> I think current fashions are very much to blame in a lot of cases. A sleek touchscreen operated car in the showroom is a sexier buy than your more traditional button festooned dashboard. Buyer's only get a chance to regret it after they've spent a lot of time with the vehicle.
Exactly. Touch screens are pure tech fad in about 50% of use cases at least, with the decision to use them not based on any kind of practical considerations.
However, I'm a little skeptical that the average buyer is going to regret using one. A lot of people seem to get hung up on newer tech == better tech, so they never really seem to look at the newer technology with a critical eye. I often prefer older tech in some cases (e.g. buttons and knows), but my fiancee often doesn't get it and advises me to stop fighting it and go with the trend.
> A heavily vibrating vehicle which needs to be operated quickly and with 100% reliability by a human operator really should not be operated via a proliferation of touch screens and touch buttons as the images above show.
In fairness to SpaceX, Dragon largely isn't designed to be operated by a human. There's a reason that page calls out stuff like "how warm should the cabin be" as the sort of decisions being made with these touchscreens.
> Crew Dragon will be a fully autonomous spacecraft that can also be monitored & controlled by on board astronauts and SpaceX mission control in Hawthorne, CA.
I would be very surprised if Dragon did not include the 21st century equivalent of the Apollo 8-ball, manual translation controller and stick.
NASA is a very conservative organization and if there is a lesson to be learned from past near disasters, is how limited is the foresight of mission planners and how infinitely adaptable are the human astronauts.
It has a stick and a couple buttons for most of the functionality that can be useful to the pilots in case the craft misbehaves. It seems to have rotary input so it can manage rotation and translation.
A lot of the controls in an Apollo were to be used in normal manual operations that are automated (or have no counterpart) in Dragons.
There are a few physical buttons for the few critical functions you might want to trigger in the boost/reentry phase. The rest is either 1 g or microgravity and a touchscreen should not be a problem.
BTW, not surre if they implemented it in the end, but they planned to handle screen blurring due to vibrations by shifting the screen content based on accelerometer data in real time. A rather clever idea IMHO. :)
> they planned to handle screen blurring due to vibrations by shifting the screen content based on accelerometer data in real time
IIRC, Orion does that by timing the screen backlight.
If I had a choice between Orion, Starliner or Dragon, I'd go with the Dragon. The spacesuits are much nicer and if I have to die, I'd rather go with style.
Perhaps I'm missing something but how could the Dragon capsule automation handle something like the emergency that occurred during the Gemini 8 mission? Without manual control by the astronauts it could have turned into a real disaster.
Computing and testing has come a long way since the Gemini days. We now have aircraft (particularly military fighters) that are literally uncontrollable without the computers.
Those control systems only work within certain preprogrammed constraints. They are generally incapable of handling unexpected situations outside of the design limits.
Computerized fly by wire systems still depend on a pilot in the loop, especially in the case of a mechanical failure.
So let’s say the airplane gets damaged, and one of the flight controls is no longer available. A legacy airplane would still try to use that surface because it doesn’t know any better. The F-35 digital flight control systems will say, “That surface isn’t doing much for me anymore, so I’m going to have to compensate by using some other things. Maybe I’ll have to move them a little bit more to get the same effect because the pilot still wants to turn left.”
This argument doesn't make a ton of sense to me. It seems like an inconsistent comparison to compare a single touchscreen to many customized knobs/buttons/etc., when you could also compare a single set of knobs/buttons/etc. to different screen sizes across models.
Car companies don't tend to custom-design knobs/buttons/etc. for each model. They tend to reuse the same ones across many models to save on development and manufacturing costs. They also already modularize these knobs and buttons across different "accessory classes". You can probably see this in your own car even, if you see anywhere on your car's center console or dashboard which has plastic caps where it seems like more buttons or knobs belong. Those are likely buttons/knobs for additional functions in optional feature packages.
Also, even for the same screen size across models, you'd still likely need custom bezels since most models are differently sized and thus have different dashboard shapes/sizes within which the screen is mounted.
Especially with how high-resolution touchscreens in cars are becoming in new models, I doubt they're cheaper than a handful of plastic knobs and buttons.
My guess is that it's exactly what they said. It's probably harder from a software perspective to adapt touch-screen-based interfaces like Android Auto and Apple Car Play to physical controls, and those difficulties probably come up over and over as the versions of these interfaces on the phones are constantly being updated, and the car must continue supporting more and more versions at one time.
Especially with how high-resolution touchscreens in cars are becoming in new models, I doubt they're cheaper than a handful of plastic knobs and buttons.
Every modern car is going to have an infotainment system with a screen. A better question would be whether it is cheaper to have a touch version of that screen or to have buttons for the interface. I suspect that touch would be cheaper than buttons.
Especially now the US and Canada requires reversing cameras in all new cars, there has to be a screen in the car; the question then becomes whether it's worthwhile designing a second infotainment system that doesn't require that (somewhat costly) large colour screen for lower end trims in markets where reversing cameras aren't mandatory, and it seems to be that manufacturers think that isn't worth the cost.
As somebody who doesn't own a car anymore but somewhat regularly rents very different kinds of cars, I have to say that reverse parking is massively easier with a camera.
Back when I always used to drive the same car I got used to its dimensions of course, but that just doesn't happen when you merely occasionally drive very different cars.
The sensors are nice, but sensors+camera improve on that by an order of magnitude - you do not see behind your car, no matter how much you think you do. Especially small people aka children are completely hidden from the driver's point of view by the rear of the car - which is exactly in the camera's center of field.
I got a shocking example of this recently. I was towing a trailer behind my vehicle for a 14' boat (the trailer was quite a bit longer than that). I was really surprised that I could not see it AT ALL in my rear view mirror when the boat was not on it. Meaning there is at least 16' behind my vehicle where I cannot see something about 2' tall or shorter.
I LOVE mine... with the guide lines for reversing, I always center into the space as desired... it's easier than pulling in forward even. For times when the neighboring spaces are wonky, it's easier to short shrift the passenger side, aligned with the other car's passenger side, so worst case you have to pull out to let a passenger in.
Also, if every other car parked forward/reverse then the more cramped spaces wouldn't be as difficult. Note, I live in AZ, USA where more than half the cars are full sized or larger vehicles. So parking lots designed for cities with smaller vehicles are particularly difficult.
That's what I thought, but I've rented a couple with camears and they are really useful - the overlays which shows where your wheels will go with your current steering position etc.
The last car I rented had a 360 degree camera which showed a top down picture of the car and surroundings!
Yeah, that's a good point. The question here isn't whether or not to have an infotainment system that integrates with Android Auto and Apple Car Play, it's whether to interface with it via a touch screen or physical input (or both).
I think that's only half true. There are standardized controls but the dash configurations and wiring harnesses are specific to each model and then even for only a few years. So I'm in agreement with the BOM arguement generally. Also it's a marketing selling point. Consumer wants the shiny new thing.
I totally understand the business case for touchscreens in cars. It's all about reducing cost to the business, but this usually comes at the expense of safety, which is a totally unacceptable tradeoff.
* If the design of your car makes you a less safe driver, you are more likely to crash into me.
* The US as a society has committed (surprisingly recently) to providing emergency care to anyone who shows up at a hospital before asking whether they can pay. Car accidents are a sadly common reason for people requiring emergency care. That means that reducing car accidents is a public benefit.
* Modern societies have made the choice in general to require some baseline level of safety from all sorts of products in order to make commerce more efficient. If consumers feel confident that they can (e.g.) buy a random toy off the shelf for their kid without needing to do a bunch of research on whether it contains lead paint or dangerous parts, that reduces friction and increases sales. The same reasoning can apply to car safety features: it's easier to get people to just buy a car if they have a baseline level of confidence that any car they buy is safe to drive.
That's just a few reasons that first came to mind. I've already thought of one or two more that would take a little longer and a little more care to put into words, but I encourage you to think about these questions yourself when they come to mind, too.
I wouldn't consider 1986 particularly recent, regarding the COBRA/Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act particularly recent. Considering that civil rights was still a large issue well into the early 80's. Not that there aren't civil rights issues today, it's mostly that the outrage is much larger than any actual issues persisting.
Consumer protection on the other hand, is quite a bit longer in the tooth. Though did really start after the 50's. I know the original erector sets were particularly bad, as were earlier die cast models, etc.
C. Especially in this case, the safety issue affects everyone else on the road, too. If someone crashes into you while playing with their Apple Play, congrats on enjoying the unregulated free market.
If your kid takes a ride in a friend's dirt cheap car they bought because they're 17 and they get in a wreck, congrats.
If manufacturers can make and sell unsafe cars, they will, and it will drive up the cost of safe cars.
When products as critical as cars unsafe, it costs everyone, even those who don't buy them.
Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though? I'm not sure this is really a driving factor. Touch screens have marketing appeal (at least from the seller's perspective), I have to think having a shiny touch screen on your new Mazda is simply just trying to get more people to purchase a new car and nothing more.
> Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though?
If you consider the entire cost, yes. Every BOM item has a huge cost associated with it, and it's price only a small fraction.
Consider that for every item you need to:
* secure supply for the next 10 years or so
* organize purchasing and put it into the supply chain
* design assembly instructions, teach workers how to assemble it
* design and implement testing procedures
* design and implement diagnostics to figure out which specific component has failed
* maintain it and keep it available for your service network for the next 10-15 years
* deal with unexpected failure rates and be ready to re-design in case of problems
* also, every knob is actually not one component, because it needs to be connected to something, which implies wires and connectors (the most problematic components in electronics) and multiples all of the above several times.
Look at it this way and suddenly you really want to minimize the number of individual components and replace them all with a single touchscreen. Especially given that you can then deliver crappy software and the market will bear it, because we have been trained to expect and accept crappy software.
But I do agree that the marketing appeal is there, too, although I think some people are waking up.
> Especially given that you can then deliver crappy software and the market will bear it, because we have been trained to expect and accept crappy software.
I'd put it differently; I'd say we've been trained to expect anything with (user-visible) software to be crappy, and to accept it because we have no alternative.
That's especially true for automotive SW and interfaces, which raise dreck to a whole 'nother level. For a whole lot of reasons, I don't expect to ever buy a car much newer than about 2010 for the rest of my life. Avoiding (ob)noxious systems and interfaces is a large part of that reason.
I enjoy driving a manual ("stick") and distrust auto-braking/lane assist/etc. My car has airbags, ABS and traction control so I'm happy with the safety features.
No way will I buy a car where essential functions are touchscreen operated, or with any phone-home "features".
While I tend to agree that the past decade has seen some arguably unnecessary increases in complexity, the latest safety technology is significantly more advanced than even 10 years ago.
Your list includes "Air Bags, ABS and Traction Control" - this list was fine in the early 90s, but you've missed one of the most life saving innovations in recent modern car history - Electronic/Dynamic Stability Control.
Multiple studies have shown ESC has potential to reduce fatal accidents by a third - this is largely why it was made mandatory on all cars sold in the EU and US since 2011/12. If you own a powerful vehicle, especially a rear wheel drive one, the kind of driver input mess (accidental or intentional) ESC systems can clean up that otherwise has you spinning off the road is pretty amazing.
Mazda just moved to the top of my "I would buy an electric car from this manufacturer if I could" list, but they don't seem to be in a hurry to release a product.
There are lots of wires and connectors that come with mechanical controls. Everything need to be certified to make sure you don't have a recall of a million or two vehicles because the air-conditioning dials break after 6 months. All that must be crazy expensive compared to solid state electronics.
No, switches (even good ones), are cheaper than touchscreens that can handle automotive heat and vibration. It hardly matters which you use anymore, since pretty much all control heads are going to be networked onto a CAN bus or the like these days. Touchscreens are a bad idea for cars though, and I applaud Mazda for being the first to try to deliberately kick the damn things back to desks, pockets, and walls, where they belong.
Have you ever seen behind the dashboard of a modern car? It's a monstrous tangle of wiring, with inch-thick cabling bundles and dozens or hundreds of connectors. A touchscreen-centric interface like the Tesla Model 3 could easily save several kilos of cables and connectors. There's a huge amount of labour involved in installing all that wiring and a huge number of opportunities for failure.
I support Mazda's efforts here, but there are compelling commercial and engineering reasons to go in the other direction.
Do tell us all about the huge labor savings Tesla is running away with[1].
It blows my mind away how you can even begin to compare the predicted reliability of a complex touchscreen interface stuffed with active electronics to dumb buttons and wires with a straight face, let alone what fielded production units only a few years in have clearly demonstrated.
I don't think I've ever seen a touch screen with only two wires. For one thing, even power requires two wires, not one. Data for a touch screen typically requires more than one wire as well, especially considering there are two completely distinct types of data a touchscreen must transmit, those being display output and touch input.
Most touch screens I'm aware of have wire connections more like this:
> Usually they're replacing a lot more than 2 buttons/knobs.
Not usually. Other than the Tesla, most cars retain almost all of their knobs/buttons in addition to the touch screen. In fact, the linked article in the OP says they're basically replacing the touch screen input with a single volume knob that lets you additional tilt and push it. Other cars, like BMW with the iDrive, usually have a single knob that lets you rotate and scroll through menus and push to select. Granted, it's not a simple knob, since it requires multiple degrees of input, but even a plastic knob that allows rotating, tilting, and pushing is probably cheaper than a touch screen when shared across models and mass produced.
I still think the bigger savings is probably the software updates required to constantly support and make your vehicle's physical input compatible with every new update of Android Auto and Apple Car Play, which the auto-makers have no control over and can only ever play catch-up. At least with a touch screen, they know that's where the Android and Apple engineers spend their own time making compatible.
The other place it probably saves is designing and laying out the interior, since it's easier to design an interior with fewer purpose-focused inputs. I'm not sure though if the touch screen would actually be easier though, since it can't be broken up across different small areas, and the entire thing has to be within both reach and active field of view. Especially the screens on top of the dash, since those often are designed to retract, which means the space they retract into needs to be designed around the HVAC and electrical systems between the firewall and dash.
Either way, both of these savings though would be on the design and engineering side, not the bill of materials.
Most touch screens I'm aware of have wire connections more like this [...]
That link is to a toy touchscreen. Are we counting every strand of metal as its own wire now? I think the power and the data cables are each bundles of lots of such strands, and no car manufacturers worry about the individual strands because each cable plugs into the circuit board as a cohesive unit, like: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Customized-odm-15-6-i...
(First Google result for "touchscreen alibaba", it's not like this is an obscure, rarely used configuration.)
Either way, both of these savings though would be on the design and engineering side, not the bill of materials.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Those sound like good points to me, but I don't know anything about this stuff.
I do know about this stuff (currently work for one OEM and have worked for 2 others) and you're exactly right.
Something that hasn't even been mentioned is all the meetings, documentation, coordination between people that work on the components that have to interface with each other. That labor is significantly reduced when you offload most of that to the touch screen because some of that interface can now be done by the same person without any meetings. That's not just cost savings, it's also time savings, which is part of why Tesla was able to bring the model 3 to market so fast (fast at least in the car world).
That said, I much prefer tactile controls. I recently moved from a BMW to a Volvo had the BMW had physical controls for most common functions while the Volvo only has a handful of buttons and one knob for volume. It's a pretty good balance, but I do miss a few buttons and more could be done on the touchscreen to ease that longing (such as customizable shortcuts).
Cadillac is starting to go back to more tactile controls because they've learned how terrible it is without any (my wife has a CTS so I completely understand why they're doing it -- it is awful). I hope Audi changes course too.
And every single application loaded and installed, software library, SDK and license has to be rolled up into the BOM for every headunit sold/installed.
It seems obvious to me that one team of software engineers doing testing and diagnostics on a piece of software is way cheaper than training and then paying entire factories to do testing and diagnostics on each button and knob. (Not to mention we're talking about like, volume controls. Not exactly the most complicated and expensive kind of software to engineer.)
Not to mention if you screw up the software an update is generally cheap and easy. If your button is messed up you have to pay for a mechanic to tear apart the entire dash.
Of course you need to get the touch screen reliable. A touch screen is more complex than a button, but if we call it the cost of 10 buttons, a touch screen replaces more than 10 buttons...
For common functions separate buttons are better for UX. However the touch screen is cheaper.
I imagine they are that expensive. Even low volume car manufacturers often "borrow" switchgear from mainstream brands to avoid the cost of making custom switches. This is why any reader fortunate enough to afford a modern Aston Martin will find the cabin filled with a lot of Mercedes switchgear, as one example. Go back farther than that and Aston were owned by Ford, which is why mid-2000s Astons are filled with very cheap feeling physical Ford controls from this era. Etc, etc. Parts sharing is critical to affordable production.
Touch screens are staggeringly cheap now, as anyone with a Raspberry Pi and too much free time can attest, and fits virtually any car, as opposed to switch gear design which often requires the rest of the dash to fit with the design of the button or knob too. A screen mounting location is usually just a rectangular hole in a dash.
They may be cheap to create, but the cost of upgrading is incredibly expensive.
It's impossible (without great expense) to add a new physical button to a car as an upgrade. Very easy to push a software update that updates a touch display.
> Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though?
Yeah, the molding for any typical single component is tens of thousands of dollars per iteration. A car has a lot of those components, so the fewer the better.
I'd like to see a compromise on this. If there's a passenger, they should be able to use a touchscreen. For someone not used to the car, a scroll wheel is going to feel very weird. And obviously safety isn't much of an issue if the passenger is controlling it.
Cars already know whether a passenger is present of course.
Touch screens are awful for operating while you focus elsewhere.
I miss touch typing and I sure like adjusting car controls without looking away.
What's that, trust driverless cars you say? Never, and the basilisk be damned.
Not to mention that touchscreens rated for passenger vehicles and the extreme environmental changes their interiors go through are not cheap. Look at how many screens Tesla has had to replace in their cars.
my old mustang had 10 old fashioned buttons under the screen that i could use to dial a phone number. new jeep has a rectangular thingy that could swallow up everything, but somehow it didn't swallow 10 buttons, so i have to pull up the phone to dial a number while driving.
>As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars.
Before phone integration, I might've agreed with you, or at least had no opinion on the subject.
After watching many car companies, even high-end ones like BMW and Mercedes, fail utterly at producing reasonable phone integration systems or interfaces, though, I'm all-in on CarPlay.
>It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
Correct. They have given up, and it's good that they have, because they've all proven they absolutely suck at it. In the meantime, Apple and Google (?) have done it for them, at least as far as the phone goes.
(I assume the Android equivalent is equally good; no reason it shouldn't be.)
>This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric.
I think it really IS, though.
CarPlay is amazingly good, and only really works well with a touchscreen.
At this point, it would be very hard for me to buy a car that didn't have CarPlay integration with a touchscreen. I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful.
I do agree, though, that touchscreens beyond phone interfaces should be used very sparingly. The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel.
But the phone interface is distinct from that, and needs to be a touchscreen. When it's not, or when it's not present, people just pick up their phones and use them, which is worse.
As someone who recently rode in a car with CarPlay and saw two young technology professionals try to use it, I disagree. One of them owned the system and drove it every day it still didn't seem like either one really understood it ("Why's it doing that?" "Maybe because ...").
I agree that all the built-in systems I've seen are terrible, but CarPlay seems like merely the "least bad" implementation at this point. If that's as good as we can do, I'd say we're still in the "research project" phase.
Nobody riding in my (ancient) car has ever had trouble finding the big red/blue knob to change the temperature, or understanding "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want". This is a solved problem.
>One of them owned the system and drove it every day it still didn't seem like either one really understood it
Is it possible your friends are dumb? Because my 79 year old mother doesn't have an issue with CarPlay. The only potentially confusing thing is that it becomes your phone screen, and things you do on the phone influence what's on the CP screen.
The possible confusing-one-time scenario would be, say, driver using AppleMaps to navigate somewhere, and passenger using phone to look up the capital of Nebraska or whatever. When passenger pushes the home button to go to the browser, CarPlay will exit navigation and show ITS home screen, too.
Nav is still happening; you just have to switch back to it, just as you would on the phone.
And, again, this should really only be surprising once.
>Nobody riding in my (ancient) car has ever had trouble finding the big red/blue knob to change the temperature, or understanding "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want". This is a solved problem.
CarPlay makes no effort to provide anything other than phone integration, so your climate control knob is safe.
Throwing shade on CarPlay by saying the problem was solved with an aux cable is pretty laughable, honestly. Sure, you could fiddle with your phone and play music, but there's no access to nav, no access to voice controls, and you have to grabble with your phone to change anything. CarPlay provides a large screen in a static location that simplifies the music approach, plus gives you access to other functions.
Carplay would just be for music, navigation, and phone calls. It is only replacing the infotainment system. You should still have buttons or knobs or sliders for the AC/heat, cruise control, defrost, window heaters, seat heat, seat A/C, traction control, and anything else.
I just had my first experience with CarPlay this weekend and it was not positive.
What I want? An empty shelf just to the right of the steering wheel where I can charge my phone and connect it to car audio. I don't want to hand-off my navigation or music selection to the vehicle, just allow me to put my phone in a prominent visible location.
I'm a huge fan of Carplay. Instead of having to listen to FM radio or fiddle with a phone screen on a silly dashboard sticker things, I get a massive screen with my phone on it. I can listen to podcasts and Spotify, follow Waze, dictate messages, all without fiddling
Maybe I don't switch back and forth between stuff while I'm driving as much as you do? I set everything up before I need to focus on the road, and then I just drive. If I need to change to a different playlist, or switch from music to the news, I pull over, make the switch, then start driving again.
If CarPlay makes it more tempting or productive for me to do non-driving things while I am driving, then it is not a good driving UX.
If you have a smartphone, it can be tempting or "productive" (the air quotes are probably reasonable!) to do non-driving things while you're driving, if you're the sort of person who's tempted to do that when you have a smartphone available. I think this is largely orthogonal to whether or not you have CarPlay.
I'm guilty of being that sort of person occasionally. I've found that having CarPlay in my new car reduces the temptation to do "non-driving things," because the things that I do that are related to driving -- navigation apps, streaming music, and for me, playing podcasts -- become easier to do with CarPlay's UX than with just using the phone in a holder like I did in my last car. The screen in my car is much bigger, the touch targets are bigger, the UI is simplified, the design encourages me to use voice input. (In your example of changing to a different playlist, I can just press the Siri button -- which perhaps amusingly in this discussion, is a physical button on my Insight's steering wheel! -- and say "Play [name of playlist].")
It's generally illegal to pull over on an interstate highway unless you have a true emergency. Pulling over in traffic, and then accelerating and merging again (in the absence of an actual acceleration lane as with on/off ramps) is dangerous.
Yes. In this case, if changing my audio source right at that time is that important, I'll get off on an exit. But I don't think that has ever happened to me.
I would like it if all cars had some kind of standard phone mount connector. Then you buy a holder for your particular phone and there's already power/audio/whatever/wired in.
Are you sure you are talking about CarPlay? I could understand Android Auto to an extant -- it can be slightly confusing to the uninitiated, but CarPlay is just about as simple as you get -- at least in my experience.
(Please do not start a iOS vs Android battle over this comment -- this is simply my experience -- I use both on a daily basis -- your mileage may vary)
So you can use your preferred maps app in your car, so you can choose music using your favorite music app, so you can send and receive text messages without taking your eyes off the road. Without it, people would just be looking at their phones anyways.
Guess we should go back to paper maps and listening to AM radio.
The whole point is that you are neither reading or writing them, they are read _to_ you, and you dictate messages if you feel the need to reply while driving, but both can be done with hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. I suppose it is up for debate whether just the act of listening or speaking is distracting enough to be considered a bad thing.
It's not up for debate; we have evidence that it's dangerous. The NHTSA says:
"The available research indicates that cell phone use while driving, whether it is a hands-free or hand-held device, degrades a driver’s performance. The driver is more likely to miss key visual and audio cues needed to avoid a crash. Hand-held devices may be slightly worse, but hands-free devices are not risk-free."
Though it doesn't link to any studies and I'm too lazy to go searching, so if you want a primary source you'll have to find it yourself...
>It's not up for debate; we have evidence that it's dangerous.
Just like talking to other people in the car or doing anything else other than driving. I know that I will take a driver getting their messages read out to them over a driver who takes their eyes off the road and glances at the phone. Good is the enemy of the perfect, and I would rather take an attainable good over an unattainable perfect.
Thanks for correcting, I actually appreciate it, no sarcasm. I mentioned it before in one of my HN comments on a thread about language learning, but as a non-native english speaker, it helps me a lot when people correct my mistakes. No matter how small or insignificant the mistakes are, because little by little, they add up.
Exactly. If I am in the passenger seat talking to the driver, I know when to shut up and let them drive. If I am on the phone talking to a driver, there is no indication of them, say, approaching a difficult merge.
It is. Car conversations are a serious issue with respect to distracted driving. I personally can't handle thinking about driving safely and thinking about a conversation. Humans are famously bad at multi-tasking and I don't see how being in a car gives us magical powers.
I thought I had read a study about talking to people in your car versus drinking, but here's a similar one with talking on a phone versus being drunk: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16884056/
If I'm speaking with someone in the car and I detect a potentially dangerous situation, I immediately stop talking to focus.
It's hard to explain, but I would say my attention is unfocused and broad. I don't know if this is ultimately safe, but I've never had an issue with it.
In fact the passenger will also detect the potentially dangerous situation and stop taking focus from you. The person in the phone will not, and may continue to distract you involuntarily.
A coworker once told me that that is what makes the difference, based on some study. I immediately believed it because it seemed so reasonable, so not citation...
I've never had a problem with it, but I also don't look at them while driving, and so forth. Maybe I'm the drunk driver who thinks he can totally drive better when he's drunk, but I've been driving 20+ years and never had an issue.
OTOH, I also evaluate and will not talk if I don't feel comfortable (poor road conditions, etc).
This will probably not endear me to the general readerhip, but if it would be up to me.
People caught while texting during driving:
First time offense: Massive fine and three month licence revocation
Second offense: Permanent license revocation. Because you just have proven beyond a doubt that you're either too dumb or too reckless to be allowed to operate deadly machinery.
Phoning while driving is dangerous. Texting while driving is just outrageously stupid and grossly negligent
> So you can use your preferred maps app in your car, so you can choose music using your favorite music app,
Get a dock for your phone and use bluetooth for the audio. (Or line-in, except headphone jacks keep disappearing...)
> so you can send and receive text messages without taking your eyes off the road.
Holy fuck no. Don't encourage this. Taking your eyes off the road is only one symptom of the problem. The problem is splitting your attention.
There's a TV show where they demonstrate this most years, Canada's Worst Driver. The challenge is to drive in a circle on a track. Talking on the phone - not ever looking away from the road - is enough to start veering off the track.
Knowing where you’re going before you take off is generally a good idea. A paper map may not be the solution—pulling up an online map and figuring out your route before getting in your vehicle is one way and what I tend to do.
I routinely see locals plug local destinations into their navigator-of-choice, though, so expecting people to know the lay of the land these days may be a bridge too far. God forbid there is construction or an accident and you have to improvise!
The fact that some just want some directions to where they're going, and to listen to some music along the way, hardly represents the downfall of civilization. I'll give you credit for avoiding the temptation to break out the ol' "wake up, sheeple!", though.
> The fact that some just want some directions to where they're going, and to listen to some music along the way, hardly represents the downfall of civilization.
Yeah, but on the directions front, it does represent a big loss in self efficacy. I don't rely on GPS, even when travelling to foreign countries.
I know people who don't even know the cities they live in. They are living in the phone's world itself, you could say.
On the other hand, the security of a smartphone with maps that cover the world have opened up self-guided international travel to people that may have otherwise limited themselves to guided tours.
I just took a sibling on her first non-guided international trip a couple years ago -- her fear was always getting lost in a strange city, but when she found out how easily her cell phone would help her navigate the city streets and transit systems, she's been on two trips on her own since then and enjoys the freedom of being able to explore on her own with much less worry of getting lost.
Of course, she could lose or break her phone, but then she's no worse off them if she lost a paper map, she'd have to ask for directions, take a cab, or find a new map, but the cell phone gives her the freedom to explore at her own pace.
I remember driving before GPS: there was tons of time and gasoline wasted driving in circles looking for things, getting lost, pulling over and trying to make sense of a paper map that doesn't have that much resolution, asking people for directions and getting useless and wrong directions, etc. It was a total pain in the ass.
I also remember life before cellphones. You couldn't communicate with people when you were en-route, so you didn't find out until you got there that something was canceled, or you needed to get something on the way, or were meeting somewhere else, etc. So again, lots of wasted time and gas.
I'm surprised people with this luddite mentality don't tell us that we should all just go back to writing letters, because things were so great back before we could have real-time conversations over a long distance...
Yeah that's me quoted above, and yes arguing against smartphones.
I believe smartphones are a net loss to people's happiness.
All of these liberating technologies are fun for the early adopters, but then become oppressive once you are expected to have them. We are quickly reaching that point.
What they really are are surveillance transponders that we carry around voluntarily.
The privacy issues are real, but you're only a slave to the device if you want to be (or you let others force you to be).
Where you see oppression, I see convenience.
If I'm on vacation and forgot to turn the thermostat down before leaving, I can use an app on my phone to do so remotely.
If there's a cold spell and the furnace fails, that same app will notify me when the house gets too cold so I can find someone to go check on it.
My wife can add (or remove) items to the shopping list while I'm already at the store.
When I'm at the doctor and want to confirm what drug I'm taking, I can bring up my online account from the pharmacy.
When I'm on the bus home and watch to finish reading the book I was reading at home on my eReader, I can bring up that book on the app on my phone -- and it will start up on the page where I stopped reading last night.
I do have my work email delivered to my phone, but I turned notifications off -- I only see a work email if I intentionally look for it.
I do have a notification app from work installed on my phone that can notify me 24 hours a day when I'm on call, but even that is more convenient from when I carried a pager and only got a numeric page so I couldn't tell whether or not it was something that had to be dealt with immediately or could wait until I got home later -- I'd have to dial-in to find out (and I had to literally dial-in on a physical phone line since in those days my phone wasn't a hotspot that can give me internet access anywhere, or I can just check on the service with my smartphone instead of having to get out my laptop)
There are lots of ways the phone makes my life more convenient.
I had to take time to check email instead of simply looking when I get the message on my phone.
I had to take a magazine to the toilet instead of reading on my phone.
I wore watches. They never lasted as long as the phone. I used to have alarm clocks too. The phones actually do better to wake me since a lot of alarm ringtones vary in sounds.
Gameboys and other portable gaming devices have been a thing for some time.
I actually carried around pen and paper when I went to the grocery store! When I was poor, I also took a calculator.
I used to have a portable television. It was black and white and possibly had a smaller screen than current phones. It definitely had poorer definition and one was lucky to pick up channels with the antennae.
Instead of arguing about who is correct about something, we can look it up in a restaurant. It is cool, and makes the conversation less about who is right and wrong and more about what is and could be.
Do you remember landlines? Wasn't it just wonderful that one couldn't have a private conversation at home? Would you seriously trade texting and/or having a private phone number for a house phone of old?
My niece carries my sister's phone around the house on video to talk to me. It dosn't matter that they are in Seattle and me in Norway.
I have a camera with me all the time and picture processing costs nothing! Do you have any clue how much I wanted that as a kid? I loved taking pictures, but couldn't afford film developing. As a bonus, my phone takes better pictures than many of the old cameras I've used. I happen to take pictures of manhole covers when I'm out, at least when I can make them interesting.
I share my artwork, that I make on paper, on the internet using my phone.
I have access to so many things. Lots of people can teach themselves "adulting" now, especially cooking. On their phone. Before I had my tablet, I used my phone in the kitchen.
Wasting life? No. You just aren't seeing the joy these piece of technology bring to others and disregarding the things the phone has replaced.
Ten years ago was 2009, dude. I definitely had an Android phone and used apps for navigation and music back then. In my car, even! Just via an aux cable instead of Bluetooth and Android Auto. (Of course, now I have a Mazda 3 and an iPhone and I use CarPlay...)
Why? because the automaker interface is AWFUL. Also, why should I pay a car dealer upwards of $2500 to gain GPS? My phone has GPS, it also has Siri so I can talk to it.
Maps and audio (music/podcasts) are the two main reasons I use carplay. Built in options in all vehicles I've used since carplay has been available are horrible in comparison.
It's a thing when many car manufacturers want you to pay a monthly subscription just get simple map updates for their already very crappy maps application.
It's a thing when when all your music is already on your phone.
Maps. Podcasts. Apple Music: “Hey Siri, play <whatever you could imagine>” Having your next appointment automatically show up in Maps ready to simply click “go.” Or “Hey Siri, where is the nearest In and Out?”
> "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want"
Well, your 2006 iPod still uses a 3.5mm analog port. But that newfangled phone over there needs a new $400 Apple USB Thunderlightning Wireless Port. And your car doesn't seem to have an interface for that.
The Lightning to analog headphone adapter is $10, and IIRC, I had a USB port in my 2002 Acura RSX in a $200 third-party head unit anyway. But, pretending everything Apple makes is a kajillion billion dollars and incompatible with everything is sure a lot more fun!
With the 3.5mm jack, you need to handle your phone for the uses the parent mentioned. This is much more dangerous than using phone integration in the vehicle and illegal in many jurisdictions.
Tiny bluetooth to aux adapters cost $10–20 on Amazon and work amazingly well.
Just get one that has a constant power source (no battery), and try to plug it in to a switched power outlet so it disconnects when you shut the car off.
Bluetooth is slow to change tracks, slow to pause, slow to connect, has annoying pairing issues, has lower sound quality, and is just generally subpar.
>Just get one that has a constant power source (no battery), and try to plug it in to a switched power outlet
So it's wireless, but with wires.
I rarely use either though, my car has usb and I have a 32Gb stick of music that stays in there.
I own two cars with CarPlay, one use a touchscreen (VW) and the other a rotary knob/button (BMW). I much prefer the knob - with the touchscreen, I have to focus on the screen for a longer period of time to make sure my finger hits the right spot. With the rotary knob, I still have to glance over, but only enough to ensure the correct "button" is highlighted. That feels less distracting to me.
All that said, I try to use voice control whenever possible. But, that's not yet a complete solution, as Apple keeps Siri from accessing non-Apple apps (can't voice control into Pandora or Google Maps).
Apple keeps Siri from accessing non-Apple apps (can't voice control into Pandora or Google Maps).
This is changing in CarPlay in iOS 13, as are a fair number of other things (generally for the better; I have a bit of hands-on experience thanks to a brave/foolhardy friend who's already installed the developer beta).
This hits the sweet spot for me as well. I think CarPlay is the best all-screen interface I've seen, but having to touch the screen is borderline useless. Even the most minuscule bump in the road usually results in a miss-touch for me, whereas with a wheel as you say you can just glance at the screen, count the number of ticks you need to turn the wheel and be confident you'll get it right. When stopped I might use the touch screen because it's faster, but the wheel is still more convenient I find.
At this point I never use the car interface if there's CarPlay available (I usually rent cars.) The only exception is for changing car settings, which unfortunately is not exposed through in CarPlay it seems.
It always make my day when a rental car has CarPlay. And a little sad when it doesn't. Mostly because cheap rentals rarely have their own sat-nav installed and being able to use the phone on an integrated screen/audio system is really nice.
With touchscreens, there's always the balance of putting the screen in line-of-sight while driving while keeping it close enough to be touchable. I like the touchpad system in the new Acura RDX the most as a compromise, has most of the accuracy of a touchscreen (still lets you draw letters and stuff) while retaining the haptic nature of the knob/buttons (position on the touchpad is absolute -- tapping the top left corner of the touchpad means you're tapping the top left corner of the screen). Plus it has the advantage of not having your hand block the screen when you're trying to touch it.
Otherwise, the Mazda knob works well enough. I think most of the power user complaints could be addressed by better default behavior or customization on what a scroll/click does on certain screens.
Android Auto/CarPlay is easily the most distracting system I've used. The only benefit is if I choose to be distracted while driving, it's less distracting than using my phone. Being distracted while driving is a _choice_ and sadly one that many drivers want to have.
>CarPlay is amazingly good, and only really works well with a touchscreen.
>At this point, it would be very hard for me to buy a car that didn't have CarPlay integration with a touchscreen. I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful.
Well, maybe the solution is to make apple carplay and android auto to work well with a dpad and buttons configuration, those interfaces have been working perfectly for videoconsoles and tvs, and a car system is more similar to that than to a phone.
Actually the system works well, and it's designed for that, And as the test confirm, using the touchscreen while driving is dangerous. The same that you can't use a video app while driving, the touchscreen should be disables while the car is moving.
Personally I don’t mind using a remote to navigate menus; dedicated, physical buttons can in many cases make things easier. What I absolutely despise, however, is the latency between said button presses and the actual acknowledgment on-screen.
In my experience, the latency on cable TV boxes, Smart TVs, and in-flight entertainment systems has progressively gotten worse, not better over the years.
This latency, when coupled with a car’s touch screen is even worse.
Android Auto actually works quite well with Audi's jog wheel thing. The 2018 Q5 I rented last year had no touch screen, just this knob. Worked totally fine and required no touching a screen.
This really saddens me. My 2010 Acura has controls that I really like, almost everything is a physical button/knob that I can hit without taking my eyes off the road.
I don't know about CarPlay but Android Auto works good enough with knob controls.
I have a 2014 Mazda3, which Mazda offered Android Auto/CarPlay upgrade for a fee earlier this year and I upgraded. My car has a touchscreen, but disables all touch features above a certain speed (5 or 10 mph I think). I don't think I'm really missing anything on Android Auto without touch.
> I do agree, though, that touchscreens beyond phone interfaces should be used very sparingly. The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel.
This is a very common misconception. You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive.
In fact, you can this for most of the common controls. The settings on the touch screen are mostly for things that you only really bother with once like saving your seat-position and personal settings to your driver profile.
> You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive.
I've owned a Tesla for nearly 3 years, and I have no idea how to do that via the steering wheel controls. I'll dork around with the interface when I get back in my car after work today to try to figure that out. But evidently at least for me, feature discovery is half the challenge, no matter how easy it is once you've discovered it.
Same here.
That being said, I never felt it was difficult to switch on off the AC since if you just press the fan for about a second, it shuts it down. This is the sort of stuff I would have liked to be voice activated.
> The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea.
Terrible idea? It's the best thing since sliced iPhone. Keep in mind that the "car" is usually driving itself; that's a much higher level of solving the "silly human takes eyes and hands off road" problem, which makes what Mazda is doing seem, frankly, short-sighted (disclosure: although a Honda/BMW/Tesla fan, I've always secretly cheered for Mazda because I like their driving "DNA," and if I ever buy another non-EV again it might just be an MX-5 NA or NB for autox/track use). Now, of course, they're _currently_ not in the same league, but this stuff is getting cheaper (technology! heck yeah!) and these changes should be a look toward the future. All of that said, I don't feel like there's anything wrong with the move they're making, just, again, doesn't seem terribly forward-looking -- other than that, it's perfectly fine.
> Correct. They have given up, and it's good that they have, because they've all proven they absolutely suck at it.
I started my career working on Ford Sync. I remember going to an exec fireside-chat type of thing where someone stood up and said "the worst mistake of my career was outsourcing vehicle interiors in the 70s/80s." This was to a group of engineers who were almost entirely outsourcing all of Ford Sync development to an offshore team. They didn't see the irony.
When I bought a car I went out of my way to find a way to avoid having Sync on it. I did succeed, but the best I could do was bug a separate cigarette outlet usb adapter so I could use it instead of the built-in USB port in the car. Why? Because plugging it into the car would force me to inherit all of the bugs in the assumptions built into Sync.
I left Ford with the impression that vehicle OEMs are the Nokias of the auto-world. I wouldn't bet on them to make a good consumer electornics end user experience.
>I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful.
I have this. I never use it. Instead, I mount my phone next to the screen and use Android Auto on my phone. Using the rotary dial and other buttons is a) far more difficult and b) far more distracting while driving. An action that takes 1 second with a touch requires several seconds of fumbling with a knob and buttons w/out touch.
But the important different IMHO is that a knob / buttons don't require you to take your eyes off the road. In that 1 second you look down, you could cause an accident due to inattention.
Good point. That made me realize my preference is a bit more nuanced. For anything where navigating menus or anything displayed on a screen is required, I'm all for touchscreens.
For other things, like volume adjustments, climate control, seat position, etc. I agree that physical controls that can be operated w/out visual interaction are best.
I think your assessment is spot on. CarPlay is the best all screen car interface I've used, and these days it's all I ever use if it's available in the car I'm driving. The only car interfaces I like that aren't CarPlay are all buttons and dials, i.e. pre smart phone era cars, and even then only a handful really made sense to me.
>CarPlay is the best all screen car interface I've used, and these days it's all I ever use if it's available in the car I'm driving.
Curious, do you own a car, or are you renting them?
Maybe that's why some people are such advocates for the Apple/Android interfaces: when you're driving different cars regularly it's helpful to have a consistent interface.
Meanwhile, I have never had any problem "getting used to" the various interfaces in new cars I purchase every few years.
> Curious, do you own a car, or are you renting them?
I rent. Living centrally in a major city owning a car is more trouble than it's worth I find.
Consistency is definitely one of the prime reasons I prefer CarPlay. I feel CarPlay is really dumb, and that's a good thing. There aren't really that many things I want from my car interface, beyond temperature and music control, and navigation. Of those only the latter two would be controlled in CarPlay, and it works really well – better than any other interface I've used. It doesn't try to be fancy, have a bunch of useless animations or weird interaction. There's also no dragging anywhere, or at least not that I've seen – only simple pointing. Trying to drag a slider to change temperature in one of the newer Volvos is an absolute pain.
If I spent more than a week or two with the car, maybe I'd care to learn more about its interface, but I almost never do. So you're absolutely spot on with your reflection, at least in my case – consistency is key.
I own a car with Android Auto and I use it all of the time. The biggest benefit is the voice interface, but almost everything about the nav system on Android Auto is better than the builtin one.
AFAIK, one of the main feature requests for Tesla is to add Android Auto. Its one of those things that is annoying to go without, once you've had it available for a while.
The original Model S scroll wheels are not. They regularly fail to correctly count the number of ticks. Worse, you spend quite a bit of time staring at the dash computer trying to get them into the correct mode.
My first car had dedicated buttons, which was the correct design.
The fact that they don't accurately track the number of clicks is annoying, but I spend zero time staring at the dash to get them in the correct mode. My left is set to volume and the right set to AC temp and in the past year I've never felt the need to change that.
On the flip side, the Nissan Leaf with premium audio is an example of physical controls done wrong. Everything is buttons with no tactile way to home your hand, you have to take your eyes off the road to fine the right button.
My old Honda had 3 knobs on the console with the center one being larger. There was no ambiguity when you blindly groped for controls.
I'm not sure it cleanly falls on either category. I agree with him that an all-touchscreen UI would be terrible, but I am correcting the misconception that Tesla has an all-touchscreen UI, because it doesn't.
The Tesla touchscreen interface is really good, partly I think because Tesla is just as much a software company as they are a car company.
The other car manufacturers UIs are atrocious and their historical unwillingness to use car play has set them back.
The tactile thing is one of those arguments that sounds good, but is just wrong. It’s like people arguing for the return of the blackberry form factor in smartphones.
> What you're alluding to here is personal preference.
I wasn't alluding to anything. I said so explicitly that it was my personal opinion.
> If the Blackberry form factor is truly the best, people would still be buying them today.
People are buying them. They're not as popular as Apple's iPhone, but that says more about Apple's marketing than anything else.
> you can make the UI better over time on touchscreen interfaces compared to QWERTY based ones.
My phone has a touch screen (a large one), and if I really want to, I can bring up a virtual keyboard, so your point doesn't make sense.
And a hardware keyboard doesn't mean you can't make the user interface better. Android doesn't make very good use of the physical keys, but my old BB10 OS BlackBerry did, because it was designed with it in mind, and it was continually being improved.
I'm not the person you responded to, but are people buying them?
I'd actually be curious how many people are buying them - it wasn't enough to save RIM. I think not as popular as the iPhone is a pretty big understatement and thinking that's mostly about Apple's marketing comes across as pretty clueless to me.
Some people still prefer horses to cars, but it'd be a generally bad idea for someone getting into the transportation business to focus on horse drawn carriages.
Popular doesn't necessarily mean better, but when you're an extreme outlier compared to what's dominant in the market and what's dominant in the market directly out-competed your preference when it had dominant market advantage, there's probably a reason.
FYI, BlackBerry hasn't been called RIM since 2012, and BlackBerry doesn't make the hardware. They just licence the brand to other manufacturers like TCL, which makes most of the current devices.
That's a false analogy. A horse-drawn carriage is a fundamentally different mode of transportation than a car, but a BlackBerry is identical to any other smartphone except for the small keyboard on the front.
The reason BlackBerries are not popular is because early touch screen smartphones were simply so much better than the BlackBerries of the day, and that set the precedent in consumers' minds that smartphones are slabs and smartphones with keyboards are bad (as evidenced by the people in this thread). But modern BlackBerries are just slabs with keyboards. If BlackBerry didn't aim their company at the ground at full throttle, the present phone landscape might look a lot different.
Also, most people simply don't need a smartphone with a keyboard, because all they use it for is SnapChat and FaceBook. It's like saying mechanical keyboards are inferior to rubber membrane keyboards because only a relatively tiny portion of the population uses them.
And yes, people are buying them. Not many, but it's apparently enough to be profitable, because TCL keeps releasing new models. Not on the levels of Samsung's S or Apple's iPhone devices obviously, but that's not what matters. (Close to a million KeyOne models were sold in 2017, but I don't know what the current numbers are like.)
> And a hardware keyboard doesn't mean you can't make the user interface better.
How can you do this when the device has already been shipped with the keyboard? Unless you're suggesting that Blackberry offers an unrealistic replacement program to change the keys and their function. Also tactile keyboard takes away a significant screen real estate. The market has also proven that people want bigger screens. There is no disputing that.
I don't know if you've ever used a BlackBerry, but it's not like the buttons on a car radio, which are fixed in function. The keyboard is merely an input method, like the keyboard on a desktop or laptop computer. And those don't seem to have a problem with changing user interfaces.
Furthermore, the keyboard does not significantly impact the size of the screen (it's only about an inch tall)[1], and it means the software keyboard doesn't pop-up and change the size of the screen, which is always disruptive. Also, the keyboard is touch sensitive, so the behaviour of the gestures can be changed in software (like swipe left to delete a word).
[1] The screen is too large for my preferences anyway.
I know you're trying to be snarky, but there is no product that "fits all use cases" because this implies that it's perfect.
Therefore, your pseudo code statement is inherently flawed. A perfect product or service simply does NOT exist. If it does, feel free to prove me wrong otherwise.
I use Android Auto in my car, and the only complaint I have thus far is the occasional misinterpreted input.
Often, what I intend to be a tap will be interpreted as a swipe by the display. I suspect this can be attributed more to the cheap touchscreen hardware in my low trim model, than the software in Android or to the concept of touch screen interfaces.
Just as with the older analog controls, there will be good implementations and cheap implementations. It's not productive to compare well engineered, premium, apples to cheap, mass market, oranges.
CarPlay might be good, never tried it, but Android Auto isn't all that impressive, whether there is touch screen or not. I did not find it any more impressive with a touchscreen, though.
But I think the bigger problem is that even if touchscreen were a better way of integrating with a phone, it's still a completely wrong way of interacting with anything in a moving vehicle. At least with Audi's classic MMI I could control almost everything without looking at buttons or screen (well, can't quite input addresses that way, but you shouldn't do it while driving anyway). Even apart from all the privacy-sucking implications of at least Android Auto, running infotainment through the phone with touchscreen interface sounds like a terrible idea.
I bought a 2016 Golf with CarPlay and only used it about twice. I hated how it was locked into only the functions it supported, didn't let me use the in-car nav or other functions while it took over my screen, and it also took over my phone.
If you thought CarPlay was going to let you control aspects of your car, not aspects of your phone, then you misunderstood it entirely.
It also doesn't "take over" your phone. You can use your phone normally while it's plugged into CarPlay; I think the only difference is that phone calls will be done through the car's audio system.
I'm not sure what you thought I thought. I was absolutely not expecting CarPlay itself to let me "control aspects of my car". I don't even know what this means.
Here are the problems:
* When my phone is plugged into CarPlay, it completely takes over the entire head unit/nav system/screen of the car. I cannot easily swap in and out between CarPlay and the various control systems on my center screen -- Nav, car settings, etc. I'm STUCK IN CARPLAY. I cannot have the directions from the nav system show up in the MID display between the gauges, either, even though that's a separate display.
* It took over my phone. I was unable to do anything using my phone. Perhaps that has changed, but this is the way it was in 2016 which was 2nd gen of CarPlay, where they started adding more apps.
* Phone calls done through my car's audio system -- correct. However, this was also the case over bluetooth. That was the main problem with carplay. Bluetooth already solved most of the problems CarPlay purported to solve -- I had phone calls, streaming spotify, etc. The only thing I didn't have without CarPlay was a simplified Spotify (or whatever app) UI on my in-dash screen, hiding everything else I might want to do on said screen.
>I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful.
What, exactly, are you doing with your infotainment system that requires so much use? I mean, I agree, CarPlay and Android Auto are nice, but I'm only playing music and using the navigation, both of which can be done easily without the fancy software.
>Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking
It's not merely that we are used to it, it's the entire purpose of the tactile interface: allowing you to adjust things while keeping your eyes on the road.
>What, exactly, are you doing with your infotainment system that requires so much use? I mean, I agree, CarPlay and Android Auto are nice, but I'm only playing music and using the navigation, both of which can be done easily without the fancy software.
Wow, that's an impressive knee-jerk.
First, you cast aspersions on the speaker by suggesting they're somehow using the feature too much if they care about interface efficacy.
Then you insist that key functions are done just as easily the old way, by which I presume you mean "by looking at the phone."
I'm not sure what your point is, but you're doing an admirable job at hollering at that cloud.
>The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea.
Don't knock it until you've tried it. First off, you are completely wrong about it being an all-touchscreen situation. There are plenty of physical controls. Many people like you form conclusions based on not knowing anything about the car other than what you are told by other people. Think for yourself. Take one for a test drive.
And what if I still find that it is terrible implementation by people who should not be allowed to make anything that could be used as a deadly weapon?
It is interesting that Tesla fans can't even imagine for a moment that someone might have actually tried it and did not like it...
In this case, though, this has been basically a solved problem for the past 50 years, if not longer. Yeah, there might be an argument whether a radial switch or a touchpad with gesture recognition is better, and you can play with positioning, but you don't just go to an objectively inferior touchscreen system and then try to make it slightly better.
> It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
The one piece of feedback I gave Toyota in their post-purchase survey is: please replace the hot mess that is Entune with CarPlay.
They absolutely should give up. You can't compete with an OS and ecosystem into which billions of dollars have been sunk.
I agree, for what it's worth, that analog controls are superior to touch controls while driving. I hate that Toyota replaced an audio dial with a touch up/down control. But the value of CarPlay is just way too high.
> They absolutely should give up. You can't compete with an OS and ecosystem into which billions of dollars have been sunk.
I agree, but I think the people building these systems are working under basically impossible conditions.
I am just speculating here, but in a car company I would think the people are mostly going to be passionate about "car stuff" (engine, driving experience, aesthetics, drive train, etc), and so the infotainment system considerations are going to take a back seat to all the things car enthusiasts care more about. This doesn't necessarily mean the people in the infotainment team themselves, but would definitely be whoever they report to, up the chain to whatever the 'product owner' equivalent is for the entire car (eg: responsible for allocating the budget). I would expect to find an attitude less like "let's make sure people buy this car because of the infotainment system" than "infotainment is tolerated as a necessary feature to sell the car to the masses".
On top of that, they have to build software that is going to be around for a couple decades with (ideally) no updates, and that basically doesn't ever crash. This means extensive testing -- maybe for over a year. For sake of discussion let's say it takes only another year to build the software: this means by the time the car is released, the platform (both hardware and any underlying software/frameworks) it's built on is basically already two years old -- and there's a good chance when the platform was picked it already wasn't cutting-edge.
This isn't meant to be a defense of bad infotainment software -- it's still bad. Give up, and focus your time on making a great CarPlay/Android Auto experience (at probably a fraction of the time currently spent). Make the FM radio and maybe bluetooth audio work standalone, then just rely on the phone integration for everything else (maps, text messages, phone dialing, contacts, etc).
Isn't CarPlay exclusive to iOS devices? If so, what you're describing might be viable with Lexus. It'd be somewhat pointless with the Toyota brand, where iOS users are a rather small minority.
Seriously? People will have the newest iPhone before they shell out for a car with a working air conditioner. The car is gone as a status symbol, the phone is now arrived.
We know that iPhone enjoys a minority of smartphone market share, and we know that Lexus is the luxury brand and Toyota is the everyday brand. One assumes iPhone will be overrepresented among Lexus buyers and underrepresented among Toyota buyers. Therefore it would make very little sense for the Toyota brand to abandon Android users in favor of iOS users in the design of its dashboard systems.
I wasn't suggesting they ditch android auto, but literally everyone but Mazda and Toyota have carplay as an option. Even Kia and Hyundai. Chevy,GMC,ford,Dodge, Chrysler,jeep,Fiat,Nissan, Honda, Mitsubishi. All have carplay. Mazda is going simple, which I respect. I drive a Miata pre touchscreen and I use a $50 Android phone. But to have a touchscreen an not have android auto and carplay? Why?
I think that the proportion of iphone owners who use toyotas is similar to that of the general population, so leaving out android is unlikely to happen.
Everyone wanted to be Star Trek The Next Generation and/or Minority Report. That is the reality of it. Shiny futurist magic finger-wavy interfaces. Which were designed to look as cool as possible in movies and not on the basis of practical affordance.
As a counter point - we’re already seeing the role of the driver fading away from car travel. lane holding tech is readily available in your average car now. Tesla’s can drive themselves a large portion of the time. Etc. Concerns about tactile feedback and such don’t really matter if you don’t have to pay attention to the road anymore. As we’ve seen play out with phones, people vastly prefer touch screens and vastly prefer familiarity. Standardizing cars across a couple of different interfaces vs each car having a brand new layout of analog switches, knobs, and doo-hickeys is a much better rider experience.
Much like how a “phone” went from “a device to call someone on” to what an iPhone does today, a “car” is going from “something you drive” to just another device you interact with in various ways and it also happens to be able to get you from point A to point B.
A car's dashboard doesn't have to be small enough to fit in your pocket; it doesn't have a screen you want to look at constantly where there's a direct trade-off between screen space and physical keyboard space; a car's dashboard doesn't have limits of where buttons can be because you have to hold it around the edges without pressing the buttons accidentally.
I still hate typing with on-screen keyboards, I just grudgingly accept that for a given small phone size, I'd prefer more of it to be screen than keyboard. That doesn't at all mean I want my car to turn into an Android tablet because I prefer a touchscreen in the constraints of a pocket size device.
If people really do vastly prefer touch screens, I would expect to see different control mechanisms moving in this direction (steering, shifting, etc.)
The fact that they aren't going this way in the systems that __really__ matter seems to indicate that people don't really prefer touch screens.
I was thinking the other day that there isn't really a good reason why I couldn't control my car with a PS4 controller. I wouldn't advocate for that as an industry wide change, but I'm willing to move beyond huge steering wheels and gear shifts
I think we take for granted that the modern car layout has always been the same way, but it's interesting to learn how it evolved. Some of the original designs were using tillers instead of steering wheels, for example.
Sure, but that's the exception that proves the rule.
The actual point was that when it comes to safety/critical functions, we still prefer those mechanical mechanisms. Unless you're flying or driving with your iPhone, I think the point still stands.
I think the fact that safety critical fly-by-wire systems could operate without the mechanical interface yet designers choose to do so anyway underscores this point.
I truly wish for a current phone designed even half as well as the Palm Pre and Treo were a decade ago. (Slide-out keyboard, "Just Type", non-sucking contacts and calendar, etc.) Really, I just want an updated Pre with a state-of-the-art browser and radios...
"Tesla’s can drive themselves a large portion of the time. Etc. Concerns about tactile feedback and such don’t really matter if you don’t have to pay attention to the road anymore. "
And Teslas ALMOST never kill their driver or innocent bystanders when the driver is negligently ignoring -- or bored and not paying attention to -- the road. There have been low speed accidents where the operator is tasked with taking over for the vehicle and they couldn't respond in time. Real life is neither a video game nor a perfect simulation. Limitations of the technology and the human operator as well as conditions of the road, lighting, and weather will always be a problem.
I wasn't commenting on the current state of self-driving car's safety...we can debate that endlessly so I won't. But the direction we're currently heading in is pretty darn clear.
Alright, but that's not how I read your comment. Regardless, until we as a society are so confident in autonomous vehicles that we eliminate manual control systems as outmoded and unnecessary, those systems should be designed to minimize cognitive load on the operator of the vehicle.
I don't necessarily disagree...that's just not what's happening in the real world. Car manufacturers are moving forward, quickly, with self-driving tech.
The point was you comparing a car to a phone does not make any sense right now. That elusive future where a car just becomes a device is not going to be here in the next few years, we can talk about it when it comes but right now cars kill people if you dont pay attention.
I think you're vastly underestimating how quickly car manufacturers are moving..or at least trying to move.
Tesla is already pre-selling, for money, full self-driving capability in their existing cars. And they are, of course, designing their current fleet of cars for that future. There's already a Games section in the dashboard.
We can talk about the safety aspects all day until we're blue in the face. But this is the reality.
You've got to be kidding? Yes, the touchscreens on many/most of the cars out there are a horrible user experience. I've shared in that frustration. But just look to how Tesla has handled this to see what can be possible. It isn't perfect by any means but it is such an improvement to the user experience (being able to add buttons via the UI to enable new features, maps that respond quickly, etc). They still have analog controls for volume and other things. Touchscreens are here to stay. The user experience just needs to improve.
I've never driven a car with a touchscreen. And I wouldn't want one for basic controls. Once I become familiar with old-school control locations, I don't need to look away from the road to make adjustments.
And damn, I got pulled over once for suspicion of drunk driving, in my wife's car. In the process of finding some knob, I had drifted out of the lane.
Anyway, heads-up is a great alternative. I look forward to lots of cool AR.
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars.
For me there is two different scenarii for controlling the car:
- while driving quick adjustments: volume up/volume down, temperature control, play/stop/skip music, start/stop navigation.
All of those should be via easy to understand, direct access physical controls.
- while parked (or by a passanger): navigation setting, app switching, playlist adjustments, peripherals setup, air control strategies, anything finicky really.
I see a case for these operations to be done by a touchscreen with no physical equivalent. Physical controls for those are juste hell most of the time.
In that sense, I feel Mazda is just throwing the towel when a more sensible and best of both world approach could be taken.
In the 2015 Mazda I drive, they allow touch under 5 mph (I think?) But I installed Android Auto using third-party/open source software (and touch is always-on.)
By default on your phone, plugged into the car, you have to swipe/unlock Android Auto, but if you're parked, you can do that, and access your apps, including Google Maps. You can set your destination, and it immediately opens on the car screen. I'm completely fine with this model of interface - when parked, use your phone.
However, having said all that, if you still want to use a wheel, it's important they hit the right UI. In a BMW I rented, the way it only showed relevant letters while searching for an address (using the wheel) was pretty good and I was able to type in an address surprisingly quickly, even on my first time of using the software. Probably still not quite as quick as using a touch screen, but close enough.
I suspect that when you allow touchscreen as your fallback, it's harder to be "really good" about making a good wheel + button UI. It's too easy to lean on your crutch.
From a user experience perspective, it seems strange to me that one would only consider the driver experience and not include the passenger. I 100% agree with you about the need for tactile non distracting controls for the driver. At the same time carplay controlled by the passengers phone has a lot of value in terms of value add to passengers.
Touch screens in cars are the equivalent of shiny phones. They persuade people to buy and some of them might love them.
Nearly every phone I see has a protector around it, destroying the nice looking design because one drop and it breaks. But you still need to have shiny designed phones or you won't sell them.
So cudos to Mazda. I wonder if they can keep this policy up when everyone else has shiny large touchscreens.
I have used Audi’s version of CarPlay without a touchscreen and I hated it. Circling through icons that were designed for a touch interface made no sense. Tesla’s interface is not perfect but interacting with the map is so much better with its large touchscreen.
Yep. I recently spent a day driving an S5 and S6, and the non-touchscreen carplay was terrible. I have a touchscreen version in my 2017 CR-V, and it is a joy to use. I read the comments in this thread, and it makes me laugh. So much "TOUCHSCREENS ARE THE DEVIL, NOBS AND BUTTONS ONLY." It just doesn't jive with my experience at all. Maybe it's a generation gap thing? I'm 30 FWIW.
Possibly. If the only thing you're used to and expect is a touchscreen, you will long for a touchscreen even when it is objectively a worse experience.
Seriously... I've seen people right here on HN claiming that "look, navigate to a touch menu, navigate to another menu, select an item, press and hold" is superior to "press one button on the door".
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars
The flexibility to benefit from rapid product iteration. If you think of cars as mostly software products that receive updates over the air, a flexible interface makes a lot more sense (even though I agree that it makes for a pretty bad user interface).
If we extend this idea, why not do it for airplanes? It seems like a bad idea to be changing the layout of mission-critical systems. I'm sure it'd wreak havoc if the cockpit of a 787 was all touch screens, with UI changes pushed at the whim of developers.
I drive a car with analog controls. The buttons for controlling the radio, hazard lights, the A/C, etc are all static. I wouldn't want it to change. It gets the job done; it doesn't need iteration, and messing with it would reduce safety. I don't have to look at the controls, because the buttons are of various shapes/sizes that I know. Tactile feedback is value in keeping eyes on the road.
An A380 is already full of screens where touch input could be introduced. All major airplane manufacturers are definitely experimenting with touch screens in the cockpit [1]. I guess not for flight critical systems for different reasons, because of missing tactile feedback and limited usage during turbulent flights [2]. But maybe that's just a question of time...
I know from people inside SpaceX that they have covers for the essential switch panels which they put on when Musk is around, because he objects to them for confused silly reasons (like tesla cross-marketing). The astronauts and capsule engineers know better, of course, so this is the compromise.
I hope you're arguing in favour of the space shuttle there. It has no contextual buttons. I'll always argue that contextual controls do not belong in critical systems. Every button on that shuttle will do the same thing every time you press it. A touch screen looks nice but isn't safe. Mission control is telling you to press X button, but X button isn't actually on your display right now?? That's a big problem.
The crew dragon is designed to be completely autonomous. 99% of the time, the astronaut is just a passenger, so there is less requirement for physical controls.
In terms of mission control telling you to press X button, it is almost certain that mission control would have a simulation of the cockpit running that would show them exactly what the astronaut is seeing on their display. So they will always be able to direct the astronaut correctly.
I definitely think a touch screen in this situation can be safer, because it can display information in a way that makes it quicker for the astronaut to understand the situation. It in theory requires less training because there is less requirement to remember the position and function of every single switch.
Space missions need to account for the times when things really hit the fan, that's when design really matters. If shit goes haywire why should I assume my touchscreen is now displaying the same thing as mission controls? If it's not then instructions go out the window. If shit goes haywire in the shuttle, mission control can safely assume they're looking at the EXACT control scheme the pilot is, and can read out controls accordingly. I get that automation is intended, but for emergencies a touch screen really doesn't cut it.
>Every button on that shuttle will do the same thing every time you press it.
I agree with you in spirit, but would disagree with this particular point. Apollo had an erroneous "Abort" signal because a particular switch didn't do what it was supposed to, because it had some interesting failure modes in zero-gravity.
I think is dangerous to assume that one design is flawless over the other; both touch-screens and mechanical systems have their own unique failure modes. Maybe one is more reliable than the other, which I think is currently the case here.
Ok perhaps I could change that to "every working button on the shuttle will do the same thing every time I press it".
Your mention of zero gravity has brought up another consideration for me. Assuming it's a capacitive touchscreen you need to ensure no conductive material ever floats into contact with it by mistake. Switches and buttons have covers and rails to prevent accidental pressing but how do you manage that with touchscreens? Apple manages it on your phone because a false negative is ok in that case, I don't think you can allow that on a spacecraft. How is a floating glove finger differentiated from a glove actually attached to hand?
I don't think the "every working button" buys you much here because is could just as easily be stated as "every working touchscreen does the same thing every time I press it". The point from reliability engineering is that everything works until it doesn't. The difficulty with software systems is that they often have complexity that is tough to understand all the paths let alone test/mitigate them (see Boeing 737 Max as a recent example).
You bring up really good points on the zero gravity considerations. It would be interesting to see SpaceX's FMEA on this system to see what all they've considered.
?? Touchscreen interfaces almost always have contextual displays. So no touching it doesn't always do the same thing every time I press it. The space where a spacebar is on your phone is the same space that is sometimes the camera button. I think contextual design does not suit important interfaces.
I meant it in terms of pressing a working contextual display. I think we're saying the same thing. Software introduces many more failure pathways so it's often not suitable for primary hazard mitigation.
Elon Musk's fascination with touchscreens is absurd and dangerous.
Even in the future world where everything is autonomous, knobs and buttons will always be needed for mission-critical interactions, whether it be driving in dangerous conditions or having to perform emergency maneuvers on your "autonomous" aircraft.
I like Dynon's systems a bit more, as they have a few physical buttons to allow one to go to certain top-level / important parts of the menu system in a jiffy:
This has far more to do with customer expectations than it does with safety. It would be much harder to sell a car with a different kind of steering mechanism than a wheel. The wheel is a leftover design element. Just because it's what we have doesn't mean it's good.
And, sensibly, stuff you would use while dogfighting or landing are switches and buttons. That, and things that have to always work like the radio and artificial horizon.
Climate is not ternary, it's definitely important for driving in cold climates. To the point that if you can't see ahead, you need to stop on the expressway in order to adjust the airflow to windscreen, so that you don't collide into the other guy who has stopped to adjust the airflow in his car.
Think I have seen flight attendants use a touch screen on the intercom and the cabin lights / infotainment. I’d assume everything on the cockpit is life of death for ~300 people, so different rules apply. Imagine what a sick joke it would be if the recent Boeing crashes were caused by pilots fiddling with a touchscreen while the plane went into a dive. It’s difficult enough to work all the controls accessible without tabbing or scrolling.
> having a flexible interface makes a lot more sense
For business, not the user.
And honestly I expect the answer is simpler: this enables them to subcontract out the UI part and run it in parallel with the development of the rest of the car, because the UI can no longer affect anything else in the car design.
Which allows them to have the UI for controlling the car be done by a team without strong communication links with the team designing the rest of the car's UX.
Is that a genuine benefit, or one that shows up more early in planning and who's downsides show up late?
It's a benefit to the business. There are way more variables of interest to consumers in a car than just UI; few if any will take a crappy touch UI as a dealbreaker (especially if everyone does crappy touch UIs). So it's a pure win for business - the downsides never reach them, they only materialize on the user end, large enough to frustrate people and maybe even cause accidents, but small enough to not cause a purchasing decision change the next time one is in a market for a car.
(I need a term for those cases. Psychological externality?)
I prefer to think of cars as cars. A dock for a smartphone takes care of entertainment and for everything else discrete knobs switches and levers. Preferably clicking with a loud click.
I agree on the flexibility part. Interesting thought. Although that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a touch screen. There are many non-functional buttons in my car right now, which might be wired but just don't perform an action. The car manufacturer could make it more easy to reprogram these.
You can see it a bit as a Playstation controller (or whatever platform you like), it has multiple programmable buttons. A car could basically have the same. A touch screen is not required.
It gets tricky as soon as you need labels and/or more complicated visual feedback attached to "dumb" buttons.
The touchscreen is "lazy" in that it can defer thinking hard about your problem space and I can see why that alone would feel scary in a car.
On the other hand, there is only so much foresight you can have when you are innovating. Developing a Tesla might simply not be feasible without the flexibility a touchscreen gives you.
The stakes are much lower, but the same complaints apply to media center remote controls.
Recently my Logitech Harmony ONE died, and I replaced it with their current high-end device. I HATE it. I want to be looking at the TV when using it, not shifting attention to the remote's touch screen. Worse, the remote wants to support lots of controls, which it implements by allowing a swipe between pages. But it's way too easy to accidentally change pages, and the pages are all different kinds of things, so it's not clear how to swipe back to the one you want.
So I took the $100+ device and threw it in the closet. I bought their 665 model, which is a big "peanut" form factor. It has all physical buttons, except four are located on the edge of an LCD screen. But that's not a touch screen, it's just for labeling purposes. All the buttons on the device are physical. This $50 device is so much easier to use than it's big brother.
Related to my other comment on this article here, I bought the new device which came with the Harmony Hub. Once I connected it to my Google Assistant, I haven't looked back.
I too am glad Mazda did this, now I have to decide if I want to trade in my 2018 Mazda 3 for a 2019 one :-).
Touch screens are cheap, mechanical switches are expensive. Mechanicals are expensive from an acquisition cost, tooling/manufacturing cost, maintenance cost, and replacement cost. So automakers were happy to move everything into the touch screen and reduce these costs and boost their margin.
I hope Mazda will be able to hold this line with their accountants.
Depends, are they custom or off the shelf? Are they environmentally sealed or open? How many cycles do they need to last for? What sort of conditioning circuitry do they need?
There will always be the cost of additional wiring harness and copper wire at some cost per foot. Some additional testing time when the consoles are assembled to verify the switches are all working Etc. Time has a cost associated with it during assembly as well.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I have no problem with touch screens in cars. My problem with is with the horrible UI those touch screens provide. They're slow to respond and don't seem well reasoned for the functions it has.
It's why I love Carplay. It expands the function of the car in a needed way. Maybe analog controls are better, but interface matters less to me than function.
I understand your reasoning, but for me after having used Car Play in my wife's vehicle...it was a major factor in my car shopping experience.
I spend a lot more time getting things set "just right" on my phone than I ever will on my car. Being able to hop in and have Waze, Google Maps, Pandora "just work" and be easily accessible rather than some built in system within the car that's going to just "check a box"...it's night and day. Car Play was so far above anything I've seen in a vehicle before that I actually miss it when it's not there.
I can understand the preference for analog controls though. It will be interesting to see how it pans out.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user.
That statement isn't true, Car Play support for me was a non-negotiable for the car I purchased two years ago. Another friend made Android Auto support a big factor in his decision and said he wouldn't buy another vehicle that didn't support it. From other conversations we don't seem to be outliers, that feature support is incredibly user(buyer) centric.
Yes. At least with CarPlay you can use the knob thing on our Mazda and not use the touchscreen at all (which is disabled when the vehicle is in motion).
Mazda and other automakers build TRULY AWFUL UIs in their cars. Carplay is a godsend in this case. You can direct Siri to send texts, read texts and you have a superior GPS application. CHeck out the abomination that it Mercedes-Benz carousel for showing/selecting radio stations on their cars.
What you are really advocating is tactile feedback for digital displays--with some method of shaped feedback on by the screen itself. As a touch screen's in cars don't offer haptic feedback, that is an issue. That said some aspects like moving up and down stations or songs in a playlist can be controlled by steering wheel paddles or buttons on the wheel.
The 2019 mazda 3 without the touchscreen still has carplay and android auto. You can still do all of that. You control it with the "commmander switch" instead of a touch screen, and more often with the volume knob or buttons on the wheel for the most common tasks.
Hopefully this is a trend that catches on; I was resolved to never buy a vehicle that had touch screen controls in it, after seeing what a mess Ford had made with the UX in my wife's 2019 Edge, compared to what I have in my 2010 F150.
I think touchscreens are dangerous as hell to have in vehicles, because you cannot operate them by feel alone, like you can with a buttons and knobs interface. People are distracted enough playing on their phones while they drive, so selfishly for my own safety, I don't really want them futzing around with the janky touchscreen display to change the radio or mess with the air conditioning too.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
The baffling thing about that is that Audi's MMI system was actually pretty darned good. And a few of the cars support controlling Apple Carplay with the rotary dial.
Audi and BMW used to sell their dial interfaces as a unique advantage over touchscreen only infotainment systems. It blows my mind that they're (Audi at least) going in the opposite direction now.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
Sturdy rotary controls which really are knobs are much better for a car. If you're on a bumpy road, the axis of the control will stabilize your hand. The controlling motion (twisting) can be more easily controlled, even if the bumps are trying to move your hand up and down. (I never see cars on the highway rapidly rotate about their roll axis more than 10 degrees. This only happens in Fast and Furious movies.) Furthermore, the feedback necessary to get from the control is all tactile. Contrast this with a slider control. An up/down slider is bad, because the control movement is in line with the direction of the bumps. Even a left/right slider has some problems with this, if your arm isn't perpendicular with the control.
Contrast all of the above with controls on a touchscreen. Almost all of the feedback is visual. Simply registering your hand on the control requires visual feedback. There is almost no physical stabilization of your hand in bumpy conditions. Instead, you have to compensate with a hand/eye feedback loop, which requires even more visual attention.
It makes prefect sense: the whole automotive industry has a terrible track record for ui/ux in the non-driving parts of the cars because they don't care about it enough to put the effort in.
So they outsource to Apple and Google that made a, frankly, even with touchscreens, better system then what car manifacturers would have ever produced.
Now the problem is that Apple and Google had a hammer and treated the problem like it was a nail when it was not...
Care to elaborate on your studies? Not many cars have gone full touchscreen. I grant you that it took a bit of getting used to on my Tesla, but now I'd never want to go back. Curious how you controller for familiarity in your studies.
I totally agree. I recall the Blackberry with jog-wheel (non-touch screen), worked great, could scroll at a speed I liked, easy, one handed navigation of email, joy. Then they dropped that for the mini trackball, which they introduced with the pearl (a break into a consumer market). This was a mistake IMHO, and from a business users perspective, they sacrificed business users reaching for a consumer market that the likes of Apple did better.
Their again, many examples of not the best design happening as the consensus of public know how to use it. QWERTY keyboard layouts being classic example.
Then consoles and the mouse+keyboard combo over a game-controller pad. For FPS, mouse wins for ease of control still for me.
But the big takeaway for me about physical buttons over virtual touch-screen ones is the ability to leverage muscle memory. With physical buttons, you know were they are, how they feel and can do that without looking. Bit like sending a text from a nokia phone whilst it's in your coat pocket. Try doing that with a touch-screen based phone. Whilst not an everyday use, it does highlight the advantages of buttons in some uses.
Now, there is work ongoing in haptic feedback and some impressive work in the field of using ultrasound to create virtual surfaces you can feel. Which for many I'm sure will be great, but then the whole KISS design philosophy has somewhat taken a backseat in the name of features. But then, features are what sells many tech items today as they are still evolving. But there will always be people who prefer actual buttons. More so if you have ever been in a lift with a touch screen instead of buttons, which is something not to be sneezed at, literally unless you want to visit extra floors.
Here is a counter anecdote. Recently I moved from BMW (buttons and dials) to Tesla Model 3 (basically a big iPad bolted on to the dash). Both me, my wife, bunch of friends with Model 3, all vastly prefer the touch screen experience.
Good thing Tesla has both of those on the steering wheel so that the driver can find them without taking their eyes off the road or their hands off the wheel.
In my Mazda, above 5MPH the touchscreen doesn't respond to touch any more and you need to use the rotary controller (which is good as muscle memory allows you to use it effectively)
Have you ever used iDrive? I've been using it in cars occasionally for at least 10 years and it still confuses me.
I just bought my first vehicle with it yesterday, so maybe I'll get better at it. Touchscreens are not great in cars but if you can perform the action quickly, it beats fiddling with a knob for 15 seconds.
You didn't answer the iDrive question. I can find and fiddle with the knob/control, but I still need to look at the screen to figure out what actually happened. It's not like a simple volume knob which I can do without looking.
IOW a well-designed touchscreen UI can be better than a poorly designed non-touchscreen UI. And, unfortunately, most car infotainment systems are poorly-designed.
I have an older Sebring from 2010 with only 25k miles on it I was able to snag up for a good deal. Was a nicer 'limited' one so it still had a newer touch screen console.
It is annoying as you touch it once to 'activate' it and then have to tap the screen a second time to register the press on whatever button/input you were trying to touch.
No tactile feedback and having to press it twice and visually check to make sure the input you wanted worked.
It is much more time consuming/distracting than an older vehicle in my personal experience.
> This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
This is really wrong. People were begging Mazda to add Android Auto and Apple CarPlay for years and they have only just recently added them. Adding these features has everything to do with what people want. Android Auto is pretty amazing, and is steadily getting better as well.
I've been using touch car interface for the last 5 years (Chevy). I basically do two things:
- Bluetooth connect
- listen to spotify _from_ my phone / listen to map directions _from_ my phone.
I rarely use the touch interface - I am switching tracks either using the buttons on the wheel (most of the time), or using the phone.
Also, I do not want another yet another "kind of familiar but different" interface like most of the car touch control systems. I want the interface on my phone, that's it.
> Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
I assumed this was widely known (because of COURSE we do), but the digital touch screens were CHEAPER than dedicated physical controls for all desired functions. To design as well as to mass produce.
I was renting a 2018 car on vacation with apple car play and was very pleasantly surprised how good experience is.
For comparison, I own the same maxed-out but 2017 car without a carplay. Apple Carplay is so much better then car manufacturers system in every respect I tried (disclaimer: I did work for Apple but several years ago and on unrelated projects)
>It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
Or, people actually like CarPlay and Android Auto and audi would have to spend a lot of money to keep up. Newer audis already support CarPlay. They're only switching from a rotary controller to a touch screen.
> This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user.
I absolutely hate user interface of my Audio (with rotary knob and without touch screen), so I use CarPlay pretty much exclusively.
I would love to be able to use a touch screen on that for some of the interactions.
> It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
You can't expect that all car markers will develop a good branded interface, just like most Android phone makers have a UI that's worse than the standard Android one.
With CarPlay, I get to use a UI from a company that's an expert a making good apps.
> This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
...or figured out that you aren't as good at software as you are at building cars.
Honestly, CarPlay/Auto have been a godsend for me. The navigation software works better than anything I get from car manufacturers and just keeping me from mucking with my phone is fantastic. That said... I'm not sure the touchscreen part of that is the real winner there for me.
Of course it's not user centric. It's about capturing more revenue while limited the parts in the car. Back in the day, you had modular radio mounts. Ford broke the mold with the Ford Taurus and the integrated controls that you couldn't replace.
Now, if you care about a nice radio in your car, you need to upgrade your entire car for $5k.
I have an otherwise awesome Honda Pilot with a built in, unsupported android tablet that doesn't support carplay or android auto, and is hard to replace without heavy hackery because core controls of the car are built into the tablet.
I've hated touch screens in cars... I generally rely on bluetooth, only because the controls are so bad, at least with BT I can pick up my phone and bring it into view if needed, but the steering controls handle next navigation, which along with volume are about 95% of interactivity. The other 5% being maps.
If the Mazda navigation/interaction/entertainment experience is better, I'm definitely in favor. I miss the in-between period, where I could just insert a USB drive with sorted directories of mp3s and use that easily.
Private reason: we want total voice controlled system so we can listen to everything you say & do in car, log it and get into the ad and analytics business. One step at a time well be here.
Mazda (at least my Mazda6 from a few years ago) can do this because they have a great interface to the entertainment/info system. They have a joystick with a few mouse-like buttons on the center console just behind the gear shift. It's very easy to do common tasks like change volume, change station, skip to next in playlist without taking eyes off the road.
My wife actually didn't realize for more than a year that the screen was a touch screen. She had never had to use it.
Yup, agree 100%. We bought a 2014 Mazda 6, and while it has a touch screen, I find myself only using the control knob 99% of the time. It's vastly superior to any touchscreen interface I've ever used, and also far better than some of the mouse-like joysticks in some cars (think later 201X Lexus vehicles and such).
I'm not buying a car with no touch screen. I like to have physical buttons for AC, and quick switching between media, radio, a dial for volume, things like that. But I also need a touch screen for Google Maps, and my music apps. Often times, my passenger might navigate these.
Edit: Also, in all fairness, where the screen is relative to the dash matters, and the size of it as well. From the photos on the post, those Mazda touch screens looked pretty small and awkwardly positioned for touch controls.
Not insane but highly cynical. They are increasing risk to my - their user's - life in order to save some bucks on R&D and integration investment. Does it make you wonder where else did the make the same tradeoff? It should.
> I hope other brands start following Mazda again for this choice.
Same here. When I buy my next car, I would ensure it doesn't have controls that require me to be distracted from driving to operate even the most basic functions.
I think supporting Android Auto and CarPlay is pretty user centric. Those are the only half decent in-car interfaces I've ever used. Nothing else is close.
Mazda's touch screen is far away up on the dashboard while other brands like Citroen or Tesla place it between the driver and passenger, so it's easily operated by both. I like both Audi's rotary controller and touch screens. Both are a distraction to the driver because you have to navigate menus, not particulary because of the interface. Seat also has a touchscreen and it's a VW brand.
I vastly prefer my touchscreen to analog controls - how the heck would I control my map and nav and radio without an interface that can change at need?
Having used both, I vastly prefer the touchscreen. The rotary input takes way longer to navigate to the next letter, and it's easier to make mistakes (e.g. accidentally switching modes) and it's harder to fix them (need to cycle all the way to the end to hit backspace, sometimes having to start from scratch if your mistake was "jump out of input mode")
I've tried Android Auto in a Sonata with touch screen, and Passat and a Q5 with rotary controller. The latter were far easier to use, once you've spent 5 minutes making sure you understand how it works.
Maybe if the touch screen were Tesla-sized it would have been easier to use, but on a regular sized screen, even switching modes takes much more attention with a touch screen, because you need to look at it, move your hand to it, make sure you're hitting the correct location, wait until it registers,m make sure you've actually hit the right spot. With a rotary it was "slide down, no need to look because it clicks, click or two clockwise (still no need to look), push down, quick glance that you're on the right screen, click clock- or counterclock-wise to select what you need. Much safer and easier, and you're not going to hit a wrong thing because you drove over a bump.
For entering addresses a large touch screen is nicer, but then a keyboard is even better, but since you're only supposed to do that while parked, so hitting a wrong button shouldn't be a big problem.
I've tried Android Auto in a Sonata with touch screen, and Passat and a Q5 with rotary controller. The latter were far easier to use, once you've spent 5 minutes making sure you understand how it works.
Maybe if the touch screen were Tesla-sized it would have been easier to use, but on a regular sized screen, even switching modes takes much more attention with a touch screen, because you need to look at it, move your hand to it, make sure you're hitting the correct location, wait until it registers,m make sure you've actually hit the right spot. With a rotary it was "slide down, no need to look because it clicks, click or two clockwise (still no need to look), push down, q
There's a big difference between what is safe and convenient when you are sitting at your desk, lazily poking at the screen, and what is acceptable when you are barrelling down the highway, with the screen you need to stretch your arm to reach.
Interacting w/ a car touchscreen when you're on the highway isn't the brightest of ideas... Every car - even those w/ touchscreen - has physical buttons for top level commands (e.g. play the radio) that one could use via muscle memory or, at worst, a quick glance. Doing anything more involved that requires attention _while the car is in motion_ is just asking for trouble.
Exactly the point. But on some cars pretty much everything requires you to interact with a touch screen (cough, Tesdla, cough), and even if it does not, there's usually not enough buttons.
On my wife's Sonata, e.g., sure, you can switch the screen between map, nav. entry, radio, etc. with physical buttons. But after that it's all touch screen.Thank God they at least left alone knobs for the climate control...
Sat in the eTron lately while waiting for service. Two Nice, bright screens with haptic feedback. Very much fun, as long as I was playing with it on a showroom floor. But I shudder to think of actually trying to use on the road.
I own a Mazda that has this touchscreen and I use it to set nav destinations, but otherwise I rely totally on the analog controls. Typing with analog dials can be a nightmare though so I hope they sort this out -- my mother's Audi makes you type with analog controls and it makes me want to pull my hair out. Good luck setting a destination when you're in a hurry.
I have a newer subaru with a touchscreen and an older audi with the MMI rotary wheel. The rotary wheel is a superior interface, it has a slight learning curve, but then you do most operations by feel without needing to spend much time looking at the screen. the touch screen is finicky, and by definition requires you to take your eyes off the road to use it.
Agree with this for now, but what about when we're no longer driving the car?
When that happens a touchscreen and the ability to play games/etc makes a lot of sense. I think what Tesla and others are doing is designing and preparing for the future. Although not ideal right now, they'll be far ahead of Mazda when we transition to self-driving cars.
In order to do that, we're also going to need tens of thousands of dollars worth of additional hardware - high-end weatherproof sensors, and full-range actuators for all controls with enough authority to use all of the power the car has. Not to mention whatever pile of computers and software is needed. Changing out the UI so you can play games a little better seems like a sidenote beside that.
Then MB/BMW approach of having a touchpad near your wrist is perfect - you can draw letters with your finger without having to worry about hitting miniscule letters on the screen.
Well, I'm in the UK so I have to use it with my left hand even though I am right handed - it works fine. Because the letter recognition is based on a single letter at a time it works fine even if I make an absolute mess of it with my left hand.
When you need to type a full name. Having a keyboard present could give a huge advantage. This is not equal to having a touch screen.
Next to that, my car has a system where you choose 1 letter and only the next possibility pops up. It decreases the need of a full keyboard. It's quite likely you only need to choose the first 3 to 4 letters.
I would actually like a stronger integration with the phone for cases like this. If you need directions, just load it up on google maps and send it to your car. If you need to pull up a playlist, same thing. Of course if you are driving this should be done by the passenger.
I wonder if you’ve used Tesla’s touchscreen or even Apple CarPlay with a touchscreen and Google Maps. You only seem to mention these old UIs. The rotary control on a virtual keyboard is atrocious to type addresses and points of interest.
> It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
Tactile feedback is also a huge security benefit. This is what really doesn't make sense to me about the desire for touchscreens in cars - they're inherently dangerous.
I will say that navigation to an address is much much better with an on-screen keyboard. It is a uniformly HORRIBLE experience with buttons and knobs. Maybe the endgame should be voice, but that can be hit or miss too.
Makes me tempted to buy a Mazda. I like the AWD and reliability of a Suburu, but their touch screens are absolute garbage and going from my analog 6-disc changing Honda Accord to driving the much newer Subaru is painful.
I recently bought a new Subaru. It has regular buttons and dials on the dashboard and steering wheel for all the important stuff. The touch screen works fine with Android Auto.
Hah. My car is a 2008, older than most in-car technologies, but when I've thought about replacing it, a big click-knob was going to be a #1 requirement. It just seemed like a mousewheel for car: an instant classic.
Same reason I hate the MacBook TouchBar. It distracts, requires looking at it, does not give good feedback and is context dependent (buttons move around).
I like my touch screen. There is a lot I can do on it without much distraction. If something is in a sub menu that takes more than a fraction of a second to get to then I wait until I'm on a straight away that autopilot can handle and do it while I'm on autopilot.
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps).
How does this relate to Apple Magic Trackpad with Force Touch?
Sorry, I badly quoted there. Was meant to quote this:
> Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
Given that Force Touch give a form of feedback (haptic though), isn't that good enough? How many people believe that the Force Touch gives tactile feedback instead of haptic?
Still a massive limitation to be expected to use the device eyes on and high attention. I get that this is the trend but it's still not a good qualitative point.
A year or two ago I considered buying another car after I had a fedex semi hit me (turning left from a stop, not dangerous). I drive a 2004 corolla and love toyota, but the guy looked at me like I had grown frog legs when I asked if they had any models without the touchscreen.
It was actually a major decision in me keeping my vehicle. I do NOT like the touchscreen, to me it's a complete no-brainer that it's more dangerous. I sure as shit don't want to be clicking through crap while driving.
When I was in HS I had a friend whose family had a couple of toyota vehicles. One of them was a small orange truck from the 70's I think. That thing looked like absolute crap, but ran beautifully. The only thing that finally killed that vehicle was their son going around a curve too quickly in the rain and rolling it. It's why I decided to buy toyota and I'm 100% happy with it.
But this touchscreen issue is a big enough issue in my mind that I may start researching Mazda. I seriously do not want a damned touchscreen in my car.
The giant but not very useful 11in touchscreen in my 2017 Toyota Prius Prime can just be turned off. No really vital functions live in there, it's mostly the (iffy) GPS and settings like the audio source, which I don't need to change much. Almost all the normal things, like temp, lights, cruise etc. are still accessible via physical controls.
I think the big one for me would be radio and temp. I assume no one in their right mind would put lights or cruise control behind a touch screen, but I could be wrong there.
And maybe part of it is me being set in my old man ways, but I don't want a touch screen for any of that. Probably the only 2 things I can see being useful on that screen are the reverse camera and GPS that talks to you and you can glance at it occasionally.
Just brought the 2019 RAV 4 Hybrid a few months ago, but also test drove the Corolla. The US models differ, but I'm pretty sure the UX is pretty consistent.
The A/C on both vehicles is 100% physical controls, no touch screen required, in fact I've yet to see an A/C option on any of the touch screen menus.
Yes, the radio is mostly configured via the touch screen, but skipping stations / tracks and volume are controllable via controls on the steering wheel and a physical volume knob on the dash. We don't have carplay yet, but I think it is in the US, this might make my moot, but my main complaint is that it can be quite delayed in starting to play my itunes. I suspect this is because my phone is the secondary audio device (I usually let my wife pick/control the music), but thats a minor annoyance at most.
Edit: 6.3l/100km 37.3mpg on Hilly -> Urban commute in an SUV :)
I'm a "millennial" (25) and I don't want a touch screen either. Car companies just can't make a phone as well as phone companies do. It's not about if the touch screen can be ignored, I specifically want to not have one, like how I don't want RGB lights on a computer or a Windows key on a keyboard, even if I can just ignore them.
You can use the screen as described, but it is much quicker to roll the right steering wheel button up/down to adjust TACC speed. You can also push it left/right to adjust follow distance.
I rarely touch the screen while driving my Model 3 (or while my Model 3 is driving me).
Just something to consider is that Toyota panels do have external controls that allow you to use the panel without the touchscreen.
I have a 2016 Toyota Corolla, and the entertainment system is a touchscreen, but I haven't touched it in years. There are several knobs and buttons located around the screen and on the steering wheel that provide full control over the functions, without needing to physically touch the screen.
Maybe they have changes this in the last 3 years, but at least the 2016 models do have physical controls that are duplicated both on the entertainment panel and the steering wheel.
While there is a touchscreen, you don't need to touch it.
> That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
Genuinely curious: what does the interface being "branded" have to to with the user? To me, focusing on whether their interface is branded would be more business-driven rather than user-centric.
Last time I was in a cab it had controls in the back for the AC, a light, the windows etc. - just because I'm not driving doesn't mean I don't want to interact with the car at all.
It's funny how the dashboard UI of lower-end cars tends to be consistently better than higher-end cars, because low end cars simply have a bunch of buttons that you can use without taking your eyes of the road. Sometimes even the location of controls is much better in low end cars; the VW up! comes to mind with all important controls located directly next to the steering wheel. Beautiful. In other cars just switching the radio off has you reaching for a button somewhere between the not-ashtray and the backside of the moon.
Ignoring the radio and focusing only on airflow controls:
I dearly miss the console in my base model 2006 Yaris. It had 3 Fisher Price-sized knobs that I never had to look at when switching from feet/defog/face, changing temperature, and fan speed. It never stressed me, and each position on the knob had a satisfying clunk.
I "upgraded" to a 2017 Subaru and the air controls are laid out with completely flat, indistinct buttons. The only knob is for temperature. Any time I need to change air position or speed, I need to take my eyes off the road and find the button, and then tap it multiple times to get to the right position.
I also drove a friend's 201x Civic for a couple months, and the air controls were actually worse: tiny buttons, tiny display showing what settings are current.
The whole air system in the Yaris is great. I recently left my car sitting for a while, and a chipmunk made a nest with the cabin air filter material. I looked under the glove box, unscrewed three Phillips head screws to drop the blower, cleaned it all out and screwed it back in. No messing around with body panels or other parts that were in the way, no custom or odd-size connectors. A mechanically simple system, easy to access and maintain.
The 2017 Subaru I have has freewheeling software knobs for most functions and all of the info is displayed in the near-windshield display. Even when I have to take over from full auto control, it's pretty quick and close to my sight-line.
Renault have had controls on the steering wheel for at least 20 years now and it's still one of the best interfaces I've ever tried.
The first car I bought with my own money was a Clio and the ability to control the integrated radio system without looking at it or having to take away the hands from the wheel made that car my favourite place to listen to music.
As a matter of fact I miss it so much that nowadays I almost don't listen to music while driving anymore.
EDIT
for reference the whole music controlling part was like [1], the source button switched from FM radio/AM radio/CD player and it had a wheel on the back that skipped CD tracks or radio stations, according to the current source.
If I remember correctly the lower button ejected a CD in CD mode or changed from saved station to manual tuning in radio mode.
If you pulled both the volume buttons at the same time, it muted the radio and paused the CD player.
One thing that might not be obvious - this controller is just below the steering wheel and you press it from the back side. It's almost invisible and it feels very natural.
The Renault I have has a combination of buttons on steering wheel, that controller, physical buttons in the center panel, touchscreen and some touch elements outside of the screen.
If you want to call somebody, you have to use the touchscreen either on your phone or in the car and it's always a pain. Controlling other things in the car is fine - there are physical buttons.
> One thing that might not be obvious - this controller is just below the steering wheel and you press it from the back side. It's almost invisible and it feels very natural.
True.
Another thing that might not be obvious is that they are fixed on the steering wheel, so they are always in the same position relative the your hands, just like the gear levers in a modern Formula 1 car.
The steering wheel is where most of this stuff should be all the time. The second you force me to reposition my hand, security levels drop off a cliff, since you get involuntary movement on the other side (as proven by this post) and likely take your eyes off the road, which is bad even for a split second. I know this for a fact, having crashed a car on a motorway as I was turning down the fan (controlled by an analog button, btw).
The best car interface, imho, is something like a rotary device or arrows buttons on the steering wheel (or back thereof) which can be used to manipulate an overlay projected on (or just below) the windshield. My current VW gets close, but the screen is in the lower half of the dashboard (way too far from actual view of the road), and the system can only be partially controlled by on-wheel buttons (the main control is a touchscreen in the middle of the car).
That's a single control that's located in a highly ergonomical position - you take your hand off the wheel, and the stick is just right there. Contrast to radio/AC with inadequate/zero tactile feedback. "Stop looking at the stick, it's not going anywhere" is literally one of the first things I had drilled into me when learning to drive. (The involuntary movement comes from looking away from the road: you drop out of the feedback loop for a moment.)
I drive manual normally - I don't think ive looked at the stick in probably 10 years. For the first week or two maybe, but since then I haven't needed to.
On the other hand, I still don't know whete my A/C knob is without looking.
I'm European, I didn't even know automatic transmission existed before I was 30 :)
The gearstick is one control with a very limited set of never-changing options that you have to use all the time, basically the best you can get as muscle-memory goes. Despite all this, it's not used where hyper-attention on the road is really necessary, i.e. in racing. And where do we get gearshift controls in racing? On the wheel.
What about physical buttons for the more-used stuff (radio, AC, cruise control) and use voice control (along with physical buttons) for everything else?
Obviously, the voice control would need to havr some way to ignore the kids in the backseat, or can ask the driver / parent for permission for this to be a good idea.
It's a bit difficult for people who can't speak: temporarily or permanently; have significant speech impediments; don't speak the language the car is (currently) programmed for, are already talking to a passenger, etc.
The "obvious" problem is harder than it looks. Even searching in the navigation app gets confused by voice prompts from the same app...so you get things like "find closest gas speed station check ahead". And that's before you get various people involved, never mind any impediments.
And speach is not as easy as a button / knobb for muscle memory. In my old car I didn't have to think, just do. A touchscreen just can't compete in a car.
I am 99% sure my Clio had it attached to the steering column, so the controls were always in the same place regardless of the steering wheel angle.
I actually found this made them easier to find, as they're always in the same place relative to the rest of you. Controls on the steering wheel by contrast (as found in, e.g., my current car) move as the wheel rotates, and for some reason I can never quite keep track of where they are.
(The Clio also had the horn button on the indicator stalk. The in-car UX was super on point. Good quality stereo, too.)
You can buy little bluetooth remote controls that strap onto your steering wheel. They don't look great and you have to charge them. The charge thing is really annoying now that many cars turn off the power outlets when the car is off. I remember never really having a dead battery in my devices because they could just charge while I was parked either at work or running errands.
In many cars that's easy to fix. Just replace one relay with a jumper. Standard wire terminals fit in the relay sockets so it's not a permanent modification.
The market already exists: car improvement stuff on taobao is sold by tonnes: from the same independent DC-DC, and ECU interfaces to projection huds, and complete dashboard revamps
I still think the bash car dashboard was that of Honda Beat or Suzuki Cara — no dashboard, with just a motorcycle style gauge, and non-driving related controls almost wholely on steering wheel levers.
IIRC, that dates back to when Hughes was still part of GM. A good HUD uses collimation to project data out in the distance. A crappy HUD throws it up at the same distance as your windshield, forcing you to refocus.
My wife recently had the chance to use 3 different car UIs.
Our own little Hyundai Elantra GT 2013. No touch screen. Connect Android phone via bluetooth. Run Android Auto app. Navigate, stream music, etc etc. We're both used to this, so it's very ingrained/easy to use the phone's touchscreen to navigate the UI.
Mercedes C300. Big screen, but not a touch screen. You had to twist a joystick then move it up/down/left/right depending on... something. That UI control mechanism did not work well with Android Auto, since there were different "sections" to each screen. You had to figure out via trial and error which joystick control method to use to switch sections. Plus sometimes moving the joystick would twist it, thus ruining whatever UI navigation you were trying to perform.
Hyundai Sonata 2019. Big touch screen. Worked perfectly with Android Auto. Not one single "mis-click" like with the Mercedes.
My current and favorite car is a '08 Euro Civic (Type-R). The whole design and layout of things there is pure genius, thoroughly designed from first principles. It takes many people aback but the hierarchy of information is very well thought out: critical up the wheel†† that you can read without taking eyes off the road (speed, turn signals, RPM limit, live cam profile (from ECU cam phasing/VTEC as an eco progress bar† or VTEC led depending on engine)), secondary behind the wheel (RPM dial, fuel, cooling liquid temp), tertiary left/right hand side (depending if you're brit/jap or the rest of the world; clock, head unit AC) of the driver, all angled properly towards the driver and minimising glare, all knobs and buttons can be actioned upon either without leaving the hands off the wheel or only leaving them for the shorter amount of time, Fitt's law everywhere, with big knobs/buttons for big things, small ones for small things. No gorilla arm effect anywhere, even the window controls on door armrests fall naturally under the hand and "dangerous" things are purposely made easy-but-difficult to reach (VSA switch, dashboard backlight). Oh, and the UI of that little screen is so well thought out, well-laid-out information and navigation across various more detailed info, with a notification system that pops an (i) in the critical area and actual info front and center (low fuel, low oil pressure, freezing conditions...). Even the various beeps have sensible meaning conveyed.
It's so good I wanted to write an actual article just about it. Touchscreen dashboards just make zero sense when you thoughtfully experienced that.
(The same-year US market one (which is a completely different car) for that same generation is similar but really not as good. Sadly They later moved to a more traditional design on the new ones)
But it's unusual and scares people, like OMG there are so many buttons, this looks like an airplane cockpit.
I am a designer, have a degree even... Yet you used lots of jargon I never saw before. Can you point me some books and reading? I really need to fix my sorry education...
Nice! Honda have always put some great effort into their designs. I had an Accord Euro Luxury '05 some 14 years ago, and it was such a pleasure to drive around. Still regret selling it. It was the first semi affordable car on the Australian market to offer stability control and full set of airbags (as long as you got the luxury model).
I'd love to read that article you proposed. As much as I'd love a Tesla, my last #2 car (now sold) was a '14 Mazda 3 Astina and the rotary knob just worked so well - and so did the buttons, not to mention that simple heads up display, that I felt this is better than what the expensive cars are getting.
I have an eye for the new Civic Type R; it looks like the engineers had a field day designing that. For now, just riding a bike as health for this ageing office chair worker had to take priority.
Not in the CR-V they didn't. The entertainment system is an underpowered Android tablet.
Lots of questionable decisions like the keyless lock system not locking if the tailgate was closing as you walk away, there being no way to turn the car off but leave the radio or AC on, and the engine cutting out as you try to drive off if you started it via remote start.
Your "no way to turn the car off but leave the radio or AC on" complaint doesn't make sense to me, as the AC compressor is powered by the engine's accessory drive belt, which won't turn if the engine's off.
Otherwise, those sound like fair complaints. I'd add that Honda tried to go to a touch-based volume control in 2015/2016 and it was universally panned for its poor responsiveness and requirement that users take their eyes off the road to adjust radio volume. Can't win'em all I guess.
The volume control is fairly good in the 2018 model. There's a dial on the head unit, and a strange-but-fairly-effective touch sensitive volume control on the steering wheel.
That interior makes me think of a Cirrus airplane. Very cool. Cirrus has done some pretty amazing things with the button layout and overall UX for glass panel small aircraft.
I have one! I love the interior desing and the rpm is like floating! And the AC control is just stupid easy because the auto works very well not like on a BMW were you need to set the speed of fan for auto?!? If is auto whay i need to do anything? That's why Civic was "red dot: best of the best".
Unfortunately, I bought the cheapest wrangler I could (no power windows) and it still came with a touch screen. It is the biggest piece of crap. It won't default to Bluetooth. It will default to the radio, loudly, with an undismissable safety agreement that blocks all interaction for 5 seconds. The only loophole I've found is an aux cable, which it will default to. I would much prefer a radio.
The older/cheaper interface is WAY easier to control. Changing vent operation or fan speed on the new interface always takes way more button pushes and time until it's in the state I want.
I have a 2013 Leaf and would rather swap the battery somehow than upgrade because the newer ones all have less tactile controls and more worthless, brittle, privacy invading fad driven bullshit.
Lower end cars are often more reliable too owing in part to simpler designs. Some of the highest end luxury and status symbol cars have frequent issues and high repair costs.
i bought a VW Golf Alltrack (vw golf sportwagon). instead of an Audi Allroad because of this. the audi controls were more clumsy and less useful despite the car being an extra $20k. the audi was also not available with a manual transmission and the hatch opened slowly, insisting on an always-on electronic assist. quite disappointing.
> somewhere between the not-ashtray and the backside of the moon.
This makes me crazy. I used to drive a '99 Mazda b2500 (basically a Ford Ranger). I could reach any of the controls without even leaning forward. In a newer f150 that I used to drive for work the reach for the volume knob seems to be about the same distance as the reach to the passenger window crank in my old truck.
Real low-end cars don’t have a thermostat at all, so you’re constantly fiddling with the HVAC controls to maintain comfort. It’s the mid-range cars that get it right :)
Bret Victor's "A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design" is just as relevant now as it was back in 2011:
> There's a reason that our fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body. This is how we experience the world close-up. This is how our tools talk to us. The sense of touch is essential to everything that humans have called "work" for millions of years.
> Now, take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit.
> What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing? I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.
> Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.
> Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future.
And yet, every single phone today is nothing but a “picture under glass” and, far from a paradigm of permanent numbness, humans are intimately connected to these devices they carry with them everywhere.
Rant is the right way to describe this.
Do you remember the first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen? The joy of panning and zooming around, tapping to learn more about any particular point! I remember that first experience was a total rush and extremely stimulating.
Feeling like
the digital map was connected to my fingertip as you pan with that point stuck under your finger — absolute magic.
There are some interfaces which are absolutely superior when provided as picture under multi-touch glass.
Denying a touchscreen entirely is to make huge compromises in the overall experience when configuring something as fully featured as a modern vehicle.
I remember the first time I used a map on a capacitive screen (iPod Touch 1st gen) and yes, it was pretty special. But I also remember many hours around that era (and many following, adding more often) working with 3D models by touching and middle-mouse-dragging around. Then I got a 3D Connection SpaceMouse 6-axis joystick, which is hugely superior to the smoothest touchscreen.
Similarly, my Xbox 360 controller and modern games produce astonishing graphics and realism that feel really immediate; my eyes tell me I'm in the plane, and when I'm coming in too low and too fast I want to will the plane upwards. But I can't feel it. Pulling the stick back on my ancient force-feedback joystick with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 (wow, the graphics on that feel dated now) gave a tangible control surface load. The buzz of 'haptic feedback' just isn't the same.
I think this is a perfect example. For gross motor skills panning a map without having to think about it, nothing beats pointing your finger at it and dragging.
You don’t want the navigation interface in your car to be immersive, or particularly precise. You want it to be super responsive, and to spend as little mental and physical energy manipulating it as possible.
1) The target area is massive — nearly the entire screen. You just need to leave space to move your finger in the direction you want the screen to go.
2) Perfectly intuitive. Versus moving a cursor on the screen where you actually press the left arrow to move the cursor left until it goes off screen so that the screen will pan right
3) Instantaneous access to any point on the screen. Tap a POI anywhere and it’s info can be displayed. Go ahead and try to select POIs in an arbitrary map location with a scroll wheel. I’ll wait. It’s “haptic”, but are you doing that without looking? Something which took milliseconds now takes a full minute of frustration.
4) Instant access to menu items. Similar to #3 - a touch interface can present multiple choices and requires only a single user input to select. One touch and you’re off. A haptic interface requires scrolling through menus to highlight an item before you can select it, which most people will glance at while they do it, and requires more mental focus than a single tap. Or worse, an array of buttons next to the screen which you’re supposed to choose from to make a selection on the screen.
There are some interfaces which are absolutely superior when provided as picture under multi-touch glass.
Superior to what? I think you mean superior to mouse + keyboard, and superior to a physical map. The author agrees with you, as he clarified in a followup [1] to the rant:
> [Do I think the iPad is bad?] No! iPad good! For now!
Do you remember the first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen?
He goes on:
> In 1900, Eastman's new Kodak camera was good! The film was black-and-white, but everyone loved it anyway. It was genuinely revolutionary! But it was also obvious that something was missing, and research continued. Practical color film was released thirty years later, and gradually took over.
> [...]
> Today, iPad good. It's flat and glassy and everyone loves it anyway. It's genuinely revolutionary. But if all we have in twenty years is an iPad with a few haptic gimmicks, that'll be bad.
The first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen, it was genuinely revolutionary—hopefully, you'll be similarly impressed the first time you use a map with purpose-built physical controls (not mouse + keyboard), but that is also dynamic (like a computer/tablet/smartphone). Maybe it'll be something like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
But I love the iPad because it’s flat and glassy, not despite it.
Really? Your kitchen counter and car windshield are also both flat and glassy. Are you sure you don't love the iPad because it's a huge touchscreen controlled by software with virtually limitless capabilities, rather than because it's flat and glassy?
Superior to everything else that ever came before and that currently exists.
That's my point about you misunderstanding—the rant is explicitly about the future, as mentioned in the title and throughout the introduction.
Black-and-white film photography was superior to everything else that ever came before and that existed at the time. But it wasn't the grayscale that made it revolutionary. It's not the lack of tactile feedback that made the touchscreen revolutionary.
Yes, I love the computing device because all that it presents is a solid slab of glossy glass. If it tried to present any other affordance it would be all the lesser for it.
If the rant is supposed to be about the future, then IMO it spends too much time disparaging the present. I think it’s a stupid and pointless rant if the premise is “this isn’t the best it will get.” Duh? That’s like the ultimate straw-man.
But obviously the point of the rhetoric which I originally took issue with is stronger than simply “this is super awesome and amazing but we will eventually do better”.
Rhetoric like “permanent numbness” or claiming the experience has “no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing” is inaccurate aside from being hyperbolic.
In fact I’m comfortable stating that I’ve never felt more connected with or immersed in a map than on a sleek multi-touch display. Additional controls around the screen which I would have to move my hand to manipulate, or an attempt to shoehorn a haptic interface into that — honestly I believe it would only serve to mediate and therefore dampen the connection between user and map.
A globe is haptic. But a globe lacks the affordances of multi-touch zooming. A digital globe that allowed zooming and panning, maybe even with a dynamic physical structure to represent topography, that would be fucking cool, but hardly portable. And so single purpose as to be a novelty.
The beauty of picture behind glass is how adaptable it is to any arbitrary task and how easily it can be reshaped and reformed, and new interaction modalities invented on the glass surface which are joyful and useful and efficient.
Haptic interfaces lock you in, they dictate function based on their form, they provide fixed manipulation points which can not rearrange to best suit the task at hand. As such, haptic interfaces given our current constraints on material science are often inferior and frustrating. Particularly for tasks which require dynamically adaptive coarseness and dynamic range of inputs, such as navigation.
Haptics are particularly difficult to allow users to manipulate interfaces through varying levels of acceleration and jerk, whereas the glass surface excels at this. Faster swipes, slower swipes, flicks, jabs, back and forth movements, and that’s all just one finger.
A click button is a one dimensional interaction point. Rarely is there a “click” affordance which measures harder or softer, except on “glass” type touchpoints.
The scroll wheels in the TM3 steering wheel is a great example of haptics striving to achieve this. The scrollwheel is awesome for fine grain incrementing and decrementing. But it’s also awesome because it has a “flick” mode where if you flick it fast the behavior changes in an interesting way!
For the right hand wheel, single clicks up and down increase and decrease cruise speed in 1 mph or kph increments. But a fast flick up or down (which may actually rotate the wheel 3 or 4 or 5 click points — who knows?) will move the cruise speed up to the next closest 5mph/kph increment (not up by exactly 5mph unless you were already divisible by 5).
This is a very neat HCI trick to provide a more usable scroll wheel. First, the fact that the wheel has click-points at approximately every 15 degrees (and the exact number of clicks per rotation is crucial based on the particular task!) rather than a smooth flowing wheel, translates naturally to integer changes in state.
Second, that it does have some concept of coarse vs fine-grained adjustments through the altered behavior when you flick it (likely triggered by at least 3 rapid clicks). But this all had to be very carefully designed into the hardware and firmware to make it all work for this particular task.
Third, because the particular task at hand doesn’t have a large dynamic range in the scale of the adjustments that need to be made. Rarely am I cruising at 20mph and then quickly find I want to be cruising at 80mph, or else the wheel would be terribly frustrating!
This is why trying to use the wheel (or really any haptic control) to pan or zoom a map is an exercise in total frustration. I know because that’s how my wife’s Mercedes tries to do it. Because sometimes I want to zoom out from a scale of 1mi on screen to 100mi on screen for a trip overview, and sometimes I just want to zoom from 1mi to 1.3mi to see the next turn. There are no obvious integer set-points to allow a haptic interface to lock on to, and the GPS interfaces which impose them tend to suck. The fact that I can’t directly address any arbitrary XY coordinate on the screen instantly compounds the frustration.
I'm genuinely disappointed you haven't responded, because you clearly think deeply about interaction design, as evidenced by your analysis of this click-wheel map interface. You just don't seem to have tried to understand the rant or my replies to you at all—you definitely haven't read the links in my first reply to you.
fixed manipulation points ... haptic interfaces [are often] inferior and frustrating ... There are no obvious integer set-points to allow a haptic interface to lock on to
This is exactly the kind of thing that the author of the rant called "haptic gimmicks", and is nothing like what the author favors over touchscreens. The author is talking about a dynamic physical interface, like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
For a map, not only is there an arbitrary XY coordinate that you want, but you can literally put your finger on it, so it lets you just place the selector there. Zooming should be continuous, so the dial has no click-points. "Flying" "down" or "up" (aka zooming in or out) feels like physical motion, with momentum, so the dial has a slight physical heft, and spins with some momentum.
But of course you wouldn't want to use this dial for everything, just like you've explained with such clarity as to why you wouldn't want to use a click-wheel for everything. That's why this interface is literally made of paper—building a different interface for a different application is as easy as literally cutting and pasting.
The 6 screenshots at the beginning are from an actual vision of the future articulated by Microsoft in a video that they clearly spent real money on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0
He's not disparaging the present, as he tried to make clear by having the word "future" in the title and then another 16 times in the post. He's disparaging a vision of the future that is disappointingly widespread.
Haptic interfaces ... provide fixed manipulation points
which can not rearrange to best suit the task at hand.
What about an interface that is dynamic rather than fixed, and can be rearranged to best suit the task at hand, but is also physical?
You know, like I mentioned in my very first reply to you?
> ... a map with purpose-built physical controls (not mouse + keyboard), but that is also dynamic (like a computer/tablet/smartphone). Maybe it'll be something like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
Besides, what else did "pictures under glass" give us? Ultimate generalizability. That's a major reason why the touch screen won.
Maybe one day our devices will use nanobots to assemble any arbitrary per-app configuration of controls and gizmos and cranks and levers. But what exactly is the rant pitching in the meantime?
Nanobots sound hard to program. What if it was as easy as shaping knobs from clay and cutting paper with scissors? That's what the author works on now: https://dynamicland.org/
At CES a decade ago, I got to play with a touchscreen prototype that offered tactile feedback. Press a button and the screen would push back and/or buzz (it's been a while, hard to remember). What I do know is that it _felt_ like I was pushing on something, not just glass.
At the time, it required a big area around it. Think ATM sized. For an ATM, it'd be awesome. I'd hope Moore's law would get the tech down to phone size by now, but here we are with more apps and no tactile feedback.
There's Apple's 3D Touch, which I think is pretty great but it seems like they're trying to phase it out. It'd be nice to have an iOS keyboard with some slight amount of tactile feedback - moving the cursor around with feedback feels pretty nice and makes navigation much easier than without it.
> Press a button and the screen would push back and/or buzz
What do you mean by "press"?
"Pressing" a button (ie. pressing down on it) requires a bit more force than just touching it, so this seems like bad UX to me.
Even if you only were to have the device buzz as you touch any interactive control, I feel like that would start to feel real gimmicky real fast. There's probably a reason that technology didn't make it past CES.
You miss the point entirely: he acknowledges that touchscreens work. But he points out that they work by visual feedback only, and that this denies an enormous part of our tactile senses. In an ideal world, we would not have to choose between tactile and visual.
The responsiveness of properly done interactive multi-touch screens are undeniably tactile. They are, however, not haptic.
Haptic feedback in a touch interface is not always a feature. And the lack of haptic feedback does not, ipso facto, make an interface numb or non-immersive. Some older touch screens would vibrate in response to every touch as you typed — it made typing less accurate.
I take issue with the overly zealous defense of a haptic interface to the point where the overall experience is degraded in order to provide haptics.
Four arrow keys (or worse, a wheel-like joystick) are indeed haptic, but they are not a better way to pan a map, which is not generally done without looking anyway.
Your example is essentially an instance of of "touch screens can replace the <tactile input device> in contexts where one does not benefit from extra feedback from touch", which is true but not exactly surprising.
I would say that in a car, being able to navigate an interface without ever taking eyes of the road is a very clear example of a context where tactile feedback adds a lot
now that I think of it, this might be the reason I actually decided to go for a blackberry key 2. I knew the keyboard was better for me somehow, just couldn't really pinpoint why.
My current phone is a Key2. Before that, I had 3 Privs, a handful of Curves, and several Palms.
For me, it has always been about tactile feedback: I habitually text and drive, so a physical keyboard that allows for high accuracy without looking at the screen is an absolute imperative...everything else is a secondary consideration.
Well after owning a Tesla Model 3 I am of the opinion, why in the hell do we need forty plus buttons in cars? Seriously! (Go count your buttons, some cars are higher than that)
First off with regards to the touch screen in the Tesla. In the vast majority of drives I never ever touch it. Not once. Why not? Well I have my temperature preference set, I usually play the music that is coming off my phone, and well, what else do I need to adjust in my car? I can do music volume, do next or previous song, and pause music, from the left steering wheel button. Wipers and headlamps are automatic. Navigation is voice controlled and works.
I posted before when people came down on touch screens but let us be honest. In most modern cars there is so much automatic that you really never use the majority of controls you are presented with. Go ahead, put a sticker on every button in your car, count them. Then for each you use take a sticker off. Have fun.
Fortunately the Tesla interface is simple to use and almost everything you need is only one level deep. Unlike my other previous cars where menu travel seemed to go on for weeks.
So yeah, badly designed or badly placed touch screens are not good in cars but so is this myriad of buttons in most cars. Each car you get into you have to do a quick take on where things might be. Plus there are so many buttons. Buttons for functions you truly may never use!
> First off with regards to the touch screen in the Tesla. In the vast majority of drives I never ever touch it. Not once. Why not? Well I have my temperature preference set, I usually play the music that is coming off my phone, and well, what else do I need to adjust in my car? I can do music volume, do next or previous song, and pause music, from the left steering wheel button. Wipers and headlamps are automatic. Navigation is voice controlled and works.
I promise that if you never need to adjust a UI consisting of buttons and knobs that it will do nothing just as well as a touchscreen. UI should be made for people who adjust their settings, though.
> Plus there are so many buttons. Buttons for functions you truly may never use!
I promise you both work just fine it designed properly and placed properly.
Example, 2017 Chevrolet Volt. Center stack UI was nice to look at it but many options required multi level drill downs to change. HVAC controls were at the bottom of the center stack. Forty plus buttons between steering wheel and center console and this does not count all functions on stalks. Z4 I had had three stalks and forty plus buttons with heated seats at bottom of center stack and under.
Touch screens like anything else in the car that a user interact with can be bad or good.I found Apple Car Play when used on the Volt to be obnoxious and far more requiring me to take my eyes off the road.
I keep emphasizing one thing that people keep ignoring. You rarely if ever have to use the touchscreen at all. Almost every setting is set and forget. You catch glimpses of the navigation and such from normal eye movement. let alone, lets get real silly here, the TM3 can drive itself in traffic just fine if I wanted to get stupid and take my eyes off the road.
Well since you bring up heated seats, the TM3 does not turn on the heated seats automatically based on temperature / butt-in-seat and changing it requires 3 touchscreen taps, two of them high-precision taps, where as the Volt has simple tactile controls. Though I will say the Volt has some of the worst climate control UI I've ever seen.
Similarly the defrost is not automatic and the button requires a precision tap.
There are a couple of reasons you might need to actually use the controls in a car with some regularity.
I don't have automatic lights. So lights on/dip around corners etc. Indicators every drive. Regularly switch airflow. Turn on reflow when allergy season. Turn knob for hotter/colder air. Emergency blinkers if traffic looks to be stopping suddenly. Wipers/speedcc, screenwash etc all manual. Heated read window in the cold etc.
That's before we get onto the whole music thing, where I concede my cassette tape player is less fancy than your phone integrated whatever - but hey I can do volume without needing to look at anything. Similarly picking one of my 6 preset radio stations is trivial by touch with a glance for orientation.
Now, as you say Tesla has automated away a lot of the above. Some of that is a legitimate improvement, and truly effortless voice control seems like a proper upgrade. Touch screens? I suspect I'd only be convinced by trying, my prior is that they're terrible idea for the same reason typing on my touch screen is practically impossble without looking in a way that wasn't true back in the Nokia 3210 days. I could write whole texts without needing to look because I knew by feel what I was touching.
Much of the stuff you mentioned is either automated or has physical controls in a Tesla. Also, by law, emergency blinkers need to be a physical button.
I do think that there's a lot of stuff wrong with touch screen for everything, but right now, I think Tesla has the best balance and also adds the most value. For example, the Audis that have everything touch screen, still have 3 buttons for driver seat memory. In the Model 3, you store this in a 'profile', which stores much more information, like ventilation preferences and you can store many of them.
If it's something you're reasonably expected to do while driving (so with the car in motion) then you should be able to do it without ever having to take your eyes off the road. Physical buttons let you do that. Between the ones on the steering wheel to control 99% of multimedia, the ones behind the wheel for lights&stuff, and the ones on the center console to control car functions like A/C and whatnot, you mostly hit that target.
Touchscreens force you to take your eyes off the road. You can't fumble around and guess if you pressed the right thing or some random function. This means they are only appropriate for things that would normally be done while the car is not moving. Before someone mentions "but GPS", you should NOT be typing in GPS addresses while driving unless you're using voice. Touchscreen or not you still have to look at that screen for a pretty long time.
And I will also mention the obvious: with everything bundled on the touchscreen God forbid that one single part breaks (due to design choice [0] or simple accident). It renders a good part of the car unusable.
So yeah, I'm good with having a big cool touchscreen but this doesn't mean the basic functions have to be moved there.
Do you often get into new and different cars and drive them? Your last paragraph is an odd argument. The buttons in my car stay in the same place and don't change with context. If I want to turn the radio down I reach over and rotate the knob to the left, muscle memory and tactile response. That knob will never do anything except the radio volume. Far safer because I don't even need to glance at it.
Edit. Your top paragraph about user settings, that applies to any car that maintains a user profile, that's not a benefit of touch screens.
Okay, so how does any of this conflict with what I stated. Most vehicles with screens, touch or not, usually have audio controls copied to the steering wheel. How many buttons it takes is dependent on brand and even model. Plus you will take your focus off driving while reaching, muscle memory or not. Let alone a good driver is always looking around which includes glances left and right so as long as the task you are trying to do, buttons or touch screen, is simple you are fine.
I did not declare that settings were the property of touch screens, I simply stated that the vast majority of settings that exist are never modified. This goes for cars with buttons too.
The discussion is that touch screens are bad. My point is for those touch screens which are not placed correctly or have a bad UI, then yes they can be bad. There are some atrocious implementations out there however the Tesla is certainly not one of them.
How many cars have you driven? The whole point here is to design the UI thoughtfully. Yes, there are cars with confusing buttons and knobs, but a touch screen is worse, not better. There is no way to develop muscle memory for pushing spots on a touch screen especially when there might be a modal dialog or if a software update has “improved” the layout of functions.
Physical buttons and knobs and switches that don’t move can be learned by muscle memory alone, and even the ones you need to look down for, that takes an order of magnitude less time and concentration to deal with a physical switch over a digital icon.
There are plenty of features that are fine to be behind a touchscreen, but there are some that just need to be physical buttons. If they are on the steering wheel that counts! But I have never seen HVAC or defrost controls on the steering wheel. And most of what I see these days are soft switches and buttons that require looking at a screen to interpret, which is again, worse.
> You will take your focus off driving while reaching, muscle memory or not.
The whole point of muscle memory is that it doesn't require you to focus on it. By the same logic, you would take your focus off driving whenever you have to breathe.
Well I got the impression you thought cars had too many buttons and that was confusing. I think because the buttons in my car don't move, I always know what they do when I touch them, so it's not really confusing. As another user pointed out muscle memory means I DON'T need to take my focus off driving.
I just don't think there's the same level of muscle memory when it comes to a contextual touch screen. One method of turning on the wipers in a tesla involves pressing an on-screen button, which brings up a modal display, which you slide according to the speed of wiping, all while presumably it's raining outside, a time you should be focusing on the road!
>One method of turning on the wipers in a tesla involves pressing an on-screen button
That's just one method. There's also a dedicated physical button right on one of the stalks at the steering wheel. Why spread such information without pointing out there is a physical button?
And you're wrong about having to slide something on the screen to change the speed. That's not how it works. Why are you sharing opinions on things you are ignorant about?
Well I did say one method, I'm allowed to criticise that method even if there's another one, they included it so they've got to assume people will use it.
Your opinion doesn't trump 70+ years of Human Factors, guy. Touch screens are dangerous to yourself and other drivers because they don't provide tactile feedback or physical presence.
The knobs are great - one for temperature, one for fan speed, one for outlet (crank to the right to defrost), a fourth for volume, and the fifth scrolls through a list which is less important but still better than buttons.
The toggles with twisty ends are great too. Intuitive control of lights, wipers, and cruise control, and standardized over almost every manufacturer. Window toggles, also great, I assume Tesla has them to raise and lower windows.
Buttons have a bit of a breakdown. 15 of them are for the stereo, and mostly rarely used. Each of the knobs has a button in the middle, they're very handy (turn AC/Recirculate/etc on and off). And the mirror adjust is the remaining buttons, sure it could be on a screen with the rarity with which I use it - but I prefer physical buttons.
So overall, you could cut out 15ish buttons on the media console and replace with a touch screen, and I would be quite happy. But if you took my knobs for adjusting temperature, volume, etc I would be quite unhappy. This means that most modern non-entry-level cars make me unhappy.
You don't listen to music at the same volume in all situations.
I often set a volume level that feels right just before parking my car after getting home at the same time everybody else does. The same volume feels incredible loud when getting back to the car early in the morning.
The same goes with climate control. I can get to my car after a long run in that case I'll likely need a colder temperature than what I need after coming back to the cinema.
I find myself adjusting volume and climate often in different situations. I have an old car and use mecanical switches. Going to a touchscreen to me would be a step backwards.
This Tesla argument is completely irrelevant. One company's managing to design a good touchscreen interface doesn't mean any other touchscreen is well-designed.
Rich people who can afford Teslas may have a safe driving experience in isolation but the vast majority (who can't afford a Tesla) are stuck with a poorly designed touch interface, making road conditions less safe for everyone (even Tesla drivers with their perfect touch interfaces), through no fault of their own.
What happens when the wiper sensor malfunctions - now you're scrambling to find the manual controls to shut the damn thing off (if you even can!) Maybe it wipes faster or slower than you prefer. Same thing goes for headlamps.
For every "automatic" system you add to a vehicle, that is just one more thing that can malfunction and I find car repairs to be the most gigantic waste of time and money.
Look, we've proved out the whole "button" concept, and it just works. It's super easy and cheap to replace when it breaks. My car is not a toy, it is a utility. I want the features from the expensive "toy" cars to stay the hell away from my vehicle.
While not directly related to buttons, recently my father ran into a deer, causing moderate damage to the front right bumper of his 2017 Suburban. It cost $5000 to repair due to all the sensors and technology. It would have been $1000 or less in a 1997 Suburban.
But when one of those sensors saves him from having a crash, or even saves his life, that $4k difference isn't worth even thinking about. Even a minor crash involving another car can cost well over $4k, after you consider how much your insurance rates are going to increase.
The vast majority of increasing complexity I see in vehicles in the last decade has nothing to do with life saving sensors, and more to do with gimmicky features.
But I agree, with driving being so hazardous to health I would certainly be willing to pay more for a vehicle that has a significantly improved accident survivability.
> While not directly related to buttons, recently my father ran into a deer
So, uh, he ran into a deer even with the sensors.
We could give the benefit of the doubt and say maybe the sensors slammed the brakes when the deer was on the road and did so before he could ever react but I doubt it.
You can control climate through steering wheel controls as well. I can and do control most things - music, temperature, calls, headlights, cruise control - with either voice or using steering wheel controls. Tesla UX is pretty amazing. Compared to that when I’m in my 328i from 2011 it feels outdated.
You can control AC though the touch screen, which is mostly convenient for the passenger. The driver can also control the AC with a scroll wheel on the steering wheel.
Recently switched from a Renault Captur (with touchscreen) to an Audi A3 (without touchscreen) and the amount of focus the touchscreen requires compared to a non-touchscreen with a radial button is amazingly scary. How did anyone thought it was a good idea in the first place? Can't imagine going back to having a touchscreen now, and hope they slowly disappear from everything cars.
It must be said that the Captur on board software is hilariously bad. (I have a 2018 captur) it's not that it's entirely dysfunctional, it's kludgey and painful.
It's not only the superiority of physical buttons, carmakers seem to be bad at simple, distraction-free UI.
- A single UI task (cancel navigation, switch radio station) takes 4-6 screen presses through some dialogs/menus that have only one option
- the thing responds too slow, there are some superfluous animations and in general there's long delays between presses and feedback on the screen that you touched something.
- Random crashes when not doing anything besides driving
- Random crashes (more frequently) when using android auto or making phone calls
- Updating the software takes 30 minutes, during which no information is shown besides a randomly resetting progress bar.
Exactly ; I had a similar experience sometime back when I was lent a 2010 Audi A4 for a few months, there was a quite natural control knob placed much like in the article's pics. It really is night and day compared to my brand new Peugeot where you have to look at the screen -and wait for the interface to update on each action- to do basically anything that is not taking a call / moving the volume / changing the track or station which you can do from the wheel.
And yet the article cites Audi to be giving in to pressure from the fearless (and from Tesla?), moving from the established rotary to touchscreens in future models.
I guess that when you already had touchscreens, it's much easier to sell haptic interfaces as an improvement than when you avoided touchscreen from the beginning. "Still no touchscreens" vs "already beyond touchscreens", even when they have the exact same controls.
The only reason the A3 still has a non-touchscreen is due to the fact that it's still running a rather old platform, which is outdated compared to the Golf, Leon -- the new A3 landing this year won't have dials.
I have recently bought a 1 year old Seat Leon with their newer touch screen setup. I find it pretty well made - you still have all the dials and buttons you need for climate control and audio volume, but if you want to set up navigation you have the touch screen in a well reachable location, which is much more convenient than a dial. Best of both worlds IMO. The only thing I do on touch screen while driving is to play/pause bluetooth audio and zooming in/out of navigation.
Can you expand on this? I really don't get it... I understand why people would prefer "fixed-function" buttons like temperature up or lock doors, but I don't understand how radial button (which is just switching focus on the display) is any better than touchscreen... To me, it looks strictly worse, you need to focus on the button and the screen (to see what's selected), instead of just focusing on the screen and touching what you want directly.
You don't need to look at the button to use it. I forgot exactly how the Audi one works but once you're used to it, it's like: Press, Turn right twice: Map. Press turn left once: Audio player. Press: Play. You don't need to look at the controller and, when you're used to it, you don't even need to look at the screen. With touch screen, you'll never get used to it to the point of doing anything without looking at it.
This is a key point. With physical controls, you learn their location and use them without looking. This leads to better focus on driving. With a touch screen, you're distracted every time you need to use it.
I've had the Audi for around 1.5 weeks now, and I've already learned how to navigate the system without looking. Can easily go from navigation to Spotify in Android Auto without paying attention to where the radial is or what's showing on the screen.
Compare with the Renault Captur which I could never learn to use without having to look at where I have to tap on the screen.
Edit: while driving, I'm not doing things in the onboard system that I haven't done before, like browsing through settings and other things. I'm only interested in doing modifications to already running things or turning on/off certain systems while driving, and those were much easier to get learned under muscle control when having a radial than using touch controls (which with touch I never managed to actually learn).
I guess an easy way to compare them would be to say, going from navigation to Spotify would require me to:
(radial): drag radial down, three clicks to the right, and click
(touchscreen): find button about 10cms from the left without looking or any tactic feedback
Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit. When safety or productivity matters, you need more feedback, more options accessible and faster.
That's also why you don't program on a tablet, even with a bt keyboard. Task switching is way to slow, not enough info directly accessible and multi tasking sucks.
> Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit.
But Mazda's cockpit isn't plane cockpit either. Please go for a test drive with new Mazda 3 and you will be surpised how stupid is this decision.
If you want to volume up, change a song, yes, it is easy.
But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to:
- leave a radio interface (you must look at screen and turn the wheel at the same time)
- find where is a navi (by turning the wheel and pressing it, still looking at the screen)
- choose, again with the wheel, to start typing your destination
- and what most: again with wheel (turning it and pressing) type the address simultaneously looking on an onscreen keyboard.
All that while not looking on the road and holding your steering wheel with one hand and another on navigation wheel on central canal.
You shouldn't be doing anything like that while driving. Also if it's physical in any way you can build accurate muscle memory and know without looking that you have gone to the right spot. This is almost never the case with touch screens interfaces.
There is no safe way to interface with a screen while driving. You are taking your eyes off the road, and your focus goes with it necessarily. The safest option is no screens. It's the only reason I would never get a Tesla. If it's mission critical it needs to be physical.
It's different in a plane, because you can safely take your eyes off the sky. In fact flying by instruments only is routinely the only choice; night time, weather. So a glass cockpit/touch screen controls make sense there. But even then the key controls are still physical.
It doesn’t matter what you “shouldn’t” do when it comes to mass-market consumer devices. It only matters what people will do, especially when you share a road with them. And when it comes to vehicle interfaces, you should assume 80% of drivers will adjust them during a drive, no matter how inconvenient and dangerous is. Any system that doesn’t recognize this reality — and try to minimize the harm if it — is just going to get people killed.
They can make most things non responsive while the car is in motion. This would inconvenience the shotgun passenger but typically the driver calls the shots on the radio (in-car entertainment system) anyhow.
Unless a law is passed restricting manufacturers from allowing responsive interfaces while driving then any disabling of them will be a significant market disadvantage. No sane car company would do it.
Some manufacturers have had restricted interfaces in cars for a while now. On Ford's SYNC system I have not been able to type in an address if the car is moving. Android Auto similarly limits inputs to voice inputs on any kind of text entry while the car is in motion.
Well that's not really designing for those users then. Your original comment said there's no way to interface with a screen safely while driving, but the other user said designers need to design for those dangerous users. I was wondering how you could do that in a safe manner (I don't think you can personally, and agree with the no-control-while-moving idea).
> but the other user said designers need to design for those dangerous users.
The other user said you had to design for what people will do; disabling all access and removing the choice to interact is exactly doing that. Disabling hands-on interaction above a certain speed but allowing voice controls might be another option.
The best I can come up with is transparently overlaying small information cues on the glass of the windshield, and using sound cues. I think in general the systems available to a cars HUD should be pretty limited and the controls should be on the wheel.
I totally agree, which is why I think any screen is a bad idea. That ship has sailed though and we have millions of cars with screens, so it's still worthwhile to keep repeating that it's ridiculous to use the screen in motion, even if that's what it was designed for.
I understand the thought, but in the real world this is counterproductive and dangerous.
Some interfaces it’s pretty clear that they are best served by physical buttons, toggles, switched, etc. Blinkers, gear selector, volume, windows, for example.
Some interfaces it’s equally clear that they are best served by touch. Text input through an on screen keyboard obviously beats a scroll wheel to select individual letters. Likewise panning and zooming a map.
Now, whether some of these interfaces are being operated while parked or driving is actually a completely separate matter. As you note, any touch feature can be dynamically locked out from operating while in drive. But to answer that question you can’t take the position of a nanny chastising a child. You have to take a holistic view of what actual users in the real world will do based on your decisions.
So, navigation is a great example. People need to navigate while driving. Sometimes that means interacting with the navigation interface while under way, whether it’s due to updating a route, checking for traffic, zooming in and out. As much as you might like to, car designers don’t get to choose whether drivers are going to do this activity while driving. They can provide an interface that is as safe and convenient as possible, or drivers will just use their phones instead.
Every car nav system I ever used, including fairly recent Audi and Mercedes ones, that depended on physical buttons for input was universally terrible. So bad that it wasn’t worth using and so the phone was used instead.
Compared to the Tesla Model 3 nav system which is fully touch, highly responsive, and beautifully rendered. It is a total joy to use and increases overall safety through large touch affordances which make sense for the driving environment. And it’s so easy to activate I almost always have my destination plugged in, which means the car is showing me upcoming traffic and helping me avoid accidents through alternate routes, which is also increasing safety and decreasing overall traffic congestion.
I think we have pretty similar views while talking about the tech and usability itself. It is just that I fundamentally disagree that you need to touch or look at anything while driving.
You say people need to interact with navigation while driving, which is simply not true. People want to interact with navigation while driving. They could cope without it. We didn't even have navigation all that long ago, to say we need it is a stretch let alone to touch it while driving. If it's causing accidents, and it is, it should be considered dangerous. Perhaps the Model 3 is better at it, but it is still a danger to look away from the road even for a second or two.
That means screens are out, and we need better ways to display and interact with information while driving. HUDs, sounds or feel is all I will agree is safe.
I said people need to navigate while driving, which is almost a tautology. That is to say, while I’m driving I need to know where I’m going. Sometimes I already know from memory, sometimes I’m consulting an external source.
Whether that external source is a sticky note on the steering wheel, a phone, audible prompts, or a big touchscreen in the center of the vehicle (TM3), the driver is going to decide which to use based on the options available to them at the time.
What the driver is not going to do is pull over at an exit to stop the car and check if that was the exit they were supposed to take, and then get back on the highway and keep going.
The absolutist stance does not actually increase safety. In the absolutist stance, well people don’t need to drive at all. To design safe systems in the real world that save lives you need to provide an alternative that is both safer and as easy to use. Because a safer alternative that drivers don’t use by choice because it’s too annoying or inconvenient doesn’t actually improve overall fleet safety.
Obviously when you operate a vehicle you don’t always just look straight out in front of you. You check your mirrors. You check your blind spots. You maintain situational awareness and do that safely by planning where you focus your attention from one moment to the next. Screens are obviously not “out”, nor is it correct to say that looking at a screen while driving is unsafe. Instruments, whether for navigation or simply indicating current vehicle status such as fuel, speed, lights, etc. are an integral part of driving and digital instruments are not necessarily less safe than analog, and can potentially be more safe.
And so returning to my original point, in my personal experience, the large touchscreen in the TM3 is ideally suited for safe navigation, and improves safety when navigating particularly on an unknown route, by presenting crucial information in extremely visible and usable form, and allowing me to configure and interact with the system naturally and efficiently while I proceed along my route.
> What the driver is not going to do is pull over at an exit to stop the car and check if that was the exit they were supposed to take, and then get back on the highway and keep going.
Funny you should say that, its exactly what people did not too long ago.
You'd look up where you were going in a key map or more broadly a road atlas, write down your instructions (and keep it open to the final destination in case of road closures, etc)
I really don't see the appeal of getting in a car and beginning to drive without knowing where you're going. "I'll look it up on the road" just seems like an intersection of anxiety (deliberately increasing your chance of crashing), annoyance (deliberately making your navigational search harder to perform), and apprehension (increasing the chance you'll miss a crucial turn early in the trip due to lack of navigation).
The hope is that they have entered their navigation correctly before they left and from the time they leave 'til the time they arrive they don't need to look at the screen at all, it's all voice and smaller visual cues. I guess I just don't feel like it's a stretch to have the responsibility to figure these things out before embarking, instead of doing it on the fly which is more dangerous.
The absolutist stance could absolutely increase safety. If we ditched all screens cars could only be safer. Less convenient, but safer. I'm not saying ditch navigation or music though, but ditching off to the side navigation/media screens could only be a plus to safety. Implement navigation and media in a way that's more sympathetic to the need of remaining attentive. Any lapse in attention we can get rid of is a good one.
You haven't argued for how having screens could be safer than not having screens, only for how to improve the safety and convenience of screens we have. Your advice is probably going to be more useful, because in all likelihood we'll keep screens. But I wouldn't care if it took someone 45 minutes longer to get somewhere because they got lost, and had to pull over and ask a man sitting on a bench for directions. Driving is a privilege and we shouldn't trade safety for convenience. I think media/navigation screens could be replaced by better solutions that don't require a screen. Who says you need a full visual map at all? Who says you need to type in the address? These are problems that could be addressed, and I feel as though the screen is the lowest effort solution not the right one.
> We didn't even have navigation all that long ago
Yes we did, even if it wasn't an electronic system built into the car, and it wasn't unheard of for people to pull out physical maps and reference them while driving, or pull over and stop in unsafe locations to reference maps. N
Electronic navigation systems are what make people less likely to do those things. There's a difference between introducing a digital tool and introducing the activity it supports.
I meant digital navigation, but fair point. Trying to interact with a digital map while underway is still dangerous, like trying to use a physical map was. Listening to a GPS is great, and I'm not advocating against digital navigation completely, just devices that require you to shift your attention away from driving.
You seem to be equating touchscreens with safety and quality. These do not go hand in hand - the underlying system can be absolute crap with a touchscreen (remember old dedicated GPS units?), or they could be Tesla-equivalent but with a weird physical button input system.
> Sometimes that means interacting with the navigation interface while under way, whether it’s due to updating a route, checking for traffic, zooming in and out.
You shouldn't be fiddling with the navigation system while driving - you should do that while you're still in park. Even when I look down at my phone to see what lane I need to be in for a second, it's amazing how much distance passes when going at highway speeds. Unless you are using autopilot, it's dangerous to mess around with the map, and it's not that hard to pull over to do it, either.
Oh I definitely understand that the vast majority of touch screens are utter trash! But that's not to say that all are.
Understanding what lane I need to be in, and what the traffic conditions are up ahead around the bend; these things add to situational awareness that makes driving safer. But I'm just not going to use a shit GPS that I need to program an address by spinning a scroll wheel and individually selecting letters.
If you had a large touchscreen in your car, you wouldn't have to look down at a tiny phone screen to see these things. They would be in your peripheral vision and easily checked without losing track of the road.
Now I regularly move to the right and slow down long before approaching a traffic jam on the highway, versus the typical hard-brake when the traffic comes into view.
At an unfamiliar complex intersection (greater than 4-way), sometimes you can't figure out where the GPS wants you to go. A quick pinch-zoom before the light turns can give you the visual queue you need to avoid having to make a last minute decision as you enter the intersection. That's totally possible on the TM3 because it's instant, smooth, and fluid (and it's really great at automatically zooming back out to the right level as you start driving again).
And to give another anecdote, today on my drive home navigation was set to take me 'Home' (by the way that's two taps on the screen, and takes less than 1 second to activate as soon as you sit down in the car). I was on the highway in stop-and-go traffic with AutoPilot. My wife called and asks me to pickup takeout. I know it's too early to order, and traffic is terrible. I need to know how long to wait to order, so I tap the steering wheel control and use voice control to change the destination. Because it's internet connected, I can just speak the restaurant name and the town. It tells me the traffic-aware arrival ETA so I know when to place the order, and adjusts the route (taking an earlier exit). Unfortunately there's no single tap on screen to make the call - POIs don't have the phone numbers listed (yet)!
So I find that there are plenty of perfectly appropriate reasons to adjust navigation while driving, I just think very few people have experienced how a proper large touch-screen implementation can supplement and enhance your situational awareness and allow you to complete tasks safely and efficiently while underway. The is strictly better than the real-world alternative which is for people to try to complete these tasks using a phone-in-hand while they are also attempting to drive.
>At an unfamiliar complex intersection (greater than 4-way), sometimes you can't figure out where the GPS wants you to go. A quick pinch-zoom before the light turns can give you the visual queue you need to avoid having to make a last minute decision as you enter the intersection.
Seems like a usability problem. Google Maps displays what lanes go in what directions so you don't have to zoom in on the map and will speak it to you so you don't even have to look at your phone/Android Auto/etc.
It does show an icon representation of the intersection and which lane to be in. I just prefer zooming in, sometimes Boston intersections are quite complex.
You can tap on the bubble in the search results to display information about the place and it will have a call button there. Don't remember if it still has that bubble once you start navigating.
It is also supposed to give you POI info including the phone and working hours if you tap on any POI bubble on the screen, but it doesn't work for some reason.
This entire article, arugment and comment thread is about how Mazda is removing touch screens to improve saftey while driving. I agree the Mazda solution isn't much better though.
The person that I quoted was responding to someone who talked about keying in directions and the limitations that Mazda's limitation will cause for that. That functionality is not available while driving even with a touchscreen.
To me, its a situation of throwing out the good with the bad.
navigation was just an example. Angdthere is no place here for muscle memory. Do you want to switch radio station? (I hope I can do such thing during driving?). Look at screen where is focus now and rotate the wheel by some angle which depends on what you see on screen. Press the wheel, rotate the wheel again to select another radio station, press it again.
Things like that. Maybe after few years you will memorize parts of this.
I am not telling resignation from touchscreens is bad. Just Mazda didn't offer anything useful instead of it.
Well I do agree, it's definitely not a great solution either. I am not sure there is one that involves the screen at all.
Media buttons on the steering wheel were peak car usability. What is there really to be looking at other than the road while you drive? A map at best, but we can do better there too. A HUD of upcoming turns projected onto the glass for example. We had HUDs in cars in 1989 (Nissan Silvia) and some modern cars are bringing it back. I think that's the perfect blend of usability without compromising safety.
This gave me pause for thought. It really toes the line of socially acceptable behaviour for a driver, as evidenced by how common it is to do so. How many times have you been a passenger in a car and the driver has pulled over to adjust GPS?
I don't think I have particularly dangerous friends and family, but they rarely do.
If that's what it takes, then so be it. The yearly road toll is embarassing. It wouldn't bother me one bit if all device input turned off as soon as the car started moving. Passengers can play Eye Spy to pass the time.
Check out the control panel on a BMW X3. There are dedicated buttons for navigation, media, menu etc next to the big scrollwheel. Navigation even has two buttons. One for showing the map, one for launching a new location.
The screen is touch enabled but I cannot remember the last time I actually touched it.
Your argument doesn’t make sense to me. Why would you do any of that WHILE DRIVING?? That’s both dangerous and foolish.
As for key presses to navigate a menu you would be surprised how quickly a human memorized exactly how many times to press what buttons to get to where they want to go. In my current car I know that if I press Home, down x3, and OK I will end up in the Media menu. I can do all this without taking mu eyes off the road (or even thinking about it much after a year+ with this vehicle.
Incidentally, that was the aspect of old feature phones I most miss today. I could operate them without looking by muscle memory - and it worked because the UI was fixed, but more importantly, it was soft-real time: the delays were predictable and you could learn them too. Today's touch devices tend to lag completely randomly.
>it was soft-real time: the delays were predictable and you could learn them too.
Wow, well put! This is definitely something that we lost with the current gen of interfaces, and this articulation didn't occur to me.
Losing keypresses or clicks/touches at random, unpredictable freezes and/or delays on interactions, all this contributes to a general sense of unreliability and not being able to infer the state of the device. Consistency is actually a much more important metric than just plain latency.
There were green-and-black text UIs that allowed receptionist at hotel check you in blazingly fast, keeping an eye contact with you. No mouse, just keyboard shortcuts.
Yup. These are a source of a frequent disagreement between myself and some UI/UX folks. I believe interfaces like these were/are superior to modern ones, precisely because they allow one to work efficiently.
People do, because they can. It doesn't matter whether they should or not.
When you design something, you don't design for ideal use, you design to eliminate risky misuse. This is a core axiom of user interface design. It's not good enough to just slap a warning disclaimer on it, as the designer, you're still liable.
I would have my engineering licence revoked if I ignored possible avenues of misuse, could design them out but didn't, and then ended up in court because they misused it and someone died. This isn't a hypothetical, this is how it works in the non-software world where engineering decisions can routinely kill people.
I think it's an easy cop out to say, "Doing literally anything other than focusing exclusively on the task of driving is not worth talking about."
The reality is, people will be adjusting their radios while they drive. They will be looking for open restaurants, changing their destination, and a number of other things while driving, and pretending like they're not worth accommodating ignores some very fundamental principles on the topic of economics.
Maybe, the point is not to make it easy. Maybe the point is to make you think "Hey, there's no safe way for me to navigate through 10 different screens to get to my GPS while I'm driving. Maybe I should pull over and do that instead?"
Most touchscreen varients are actually worse than this, and it's nessecary for their displays to be within arm's reach, increasing refocus time too.
I think this just proves there are no safe manual interfaces for setting a navigation destination. Drivers should use a voice interface or stop the vehicle in a safe location.
> But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look at screen and turn the wheel at the same time)
Did you miss the part where they said they will be projecting an HUD onto the windshield so drivers won't have to look down? Your comment is arguing against a solution Mazda did not propose.
Curiously, most of the people who are defending touchscreens in this thread are not addressing the 2 safety issues brought up - inadvertent torque applied by drivers and inattention to the road ahead.
Did they change this on the new Mazda3? I had a CX-5 and you have buttons that took you to those places (audio, gps, and two more I don't remember) around the wheel thingy.
I am thinking on their new (soon) CX-30 as a possible new car as I loved the CX-5 and was told it would be mostly be based on the Mazda3.
To be fair, navigating with carplay is also highly distracting because the voice controls are so basic and it forces you to pull over and deal with one of the two touchscreens to deal with route changes, adding a stop, evaluating express lanes, dismissing modals, looking at upcoming directions, etc etc. Navigation is highly distracting period.
Voice input in cars is the worst idea I've ever seen. I've had a brand new Mercedes with the MBUX interface and extensively used Android Auto, and the voice commands just don't work. Half the time I'm sitting there repeating myself like an absolute idiot because the car completely misunderstood what I mean(yes car, "Navigate to Cramlington" totally means "Navigate to Boston, US"). I have so many horror stories of android Auto getting stuff wrong it's almost funny. And then it's just made worse when you are bilingual - voice interfaces suuuuck at working with two languages at once. Try saying "call Szczepańska" - guaranteed it won't work. Then try getting it to read a message in any language that isn't English - it's just garbled nonsense. My favourite one was when my wife sent me a link to something and Android Auto started reading the link out ....as H T T P colon slash slash W W W dot......what sort of madness is this. Who would ever want this crap in their car is beyond me.
Guess you could call me trilingual (swedish, english and spanish) and I'm having no issues with Android Auto understanding destinations even when my spanish/english is broken as hell, with music playing in the background or engine noises coming from outside.
Maybe voice commands are just not ready for polish (guessing Szczepańska is polish) but seems to work fine for at least english and spanish.
I just drove 14 hours this weekend and I can confirm the voice controls are almost entirely useless. If you’re lucky it interprets you correctly and you have a menu to sift through on a screen to pick the right option. If you’re unlucky it just does something without any confirmation. The only success I’ve really had is “direct me to <large city here>” and “direct me home”. All other efforts lead me to swear and pull over.
Granted, I was a child map reader and navigator for my parents, this isn’t easy for humans either.
It can be done properly. The BMW Mini has a pretty good voice input for the navigation, it relies on spelling out the names of cities and streets, there is a button based back-up but I find that the voice recognition works more than well enough for almost all destinations.
Voice output that spells is silly (as is Google's navigation, which overwhelms you with information you do not need).
Just because the technology sucks right now does not mean it's a bad idea. I can EASILY see voice commands in cars being commonplace and far superior to anything that exists right now.
Maybe that's a particular Swiss problem, but I suspect it's actually the case in many regions (as strong local accents are a thing): I've never seen voice input that works for place names. My current car has pretty recent technology and its voice input is great for calling someone from address book, it can even understand Japanese names. But Swiss place names? Forget it, it's impossible for the standard German interface to pick that stuff up correctly, and I'm trying to speak in the most accent-free way I can manage.
Note that plans are a less apt comparison as the cockpit of a plane under most circumstances safely permits looking away from the windscreen for 5-10 seconds at a time (or more) while under no circumstances can cars tolerate more than 1-2 seconds without risk of catastrophe (crash, loss of life and limb, etc).
If recent business jets are an indication, it's all touch based at the high end already. Also, Ipads are getting pretty popular for pilots. My understanding is that most pilots would bring one by default (two plus extra batteries typically) and that especially for GA, there is a lot of equipment and software that integrates with them. One odd thing is that some pilots use ipads to control equipment in the plane because of UI and UX issues. E.g. you can control a garmin 530 with an ipad and it seems like pilots prefer doing that because it is just easier.
I think both in cars and in the aviation industry there is the notion that the companies manufacturing UIs there are not necessarily that good at it because historically their focus was more hardware oriented. The UX of especially older equipment can be kind of clunky. E.g. many planes have an fms (flight management system) with a non qwerty keyboard that looks like it was designed in the nineteen sixties and just never updated. You still find the same design in relatively new planes like the A319.
I agree that it is nice to have physical controls for some thing. E.g. I love volume dials. But overall, touch is great when hardware designs result in very complex UX.
So, I suspect that Mazda getting rid of touchscreens is more their own inability to do good UI than any inherent problems with touch screens. The rest of the industry seems to be trying to catch up to Tesla. I recently sat in a very new Renault with Android Car and a big touch screen. It's a very nice upgrade from the previous generation which was very clunky to use and had lots of annoying bugs. Renault outsourcing the UI to a company that has a clue was a big improvement for them they were just hopelessly out of their depth.
I'm not a pilot, but my understanding is it is quite different to driving in terms of attention — a cruising pilot can easily look at a screen for 5 or 10 seconds (?) entirely safely, whereas a driver might struggle to even stay in lane looking at a screen for 10 seconds. So a touch screen is fine for a pilot but probably not good for a driver.
I am a pilot and you are exactly right. With an airplane autopilot coupled to a modern GPS, once you're cruising, you can pretty much crawl into the back seat and take a nap until it's time to land. (That's a little bit of an exaggeration but not much.)
The solution is a combination of tablet screens and accessible controls on the steering wheel or on the centre console.
I absolutely love my touch screen in my Honda and never felt unsafe because of it. All the controls for changing songs, volume, voice, etc are on the steering wheel via touch dials or a few buttons.
It’s not like the car (or airplane) companies aren’t aware of this.
I think this conflict in ideas is very well captured by the differences in flight control instrument panels in the Orion Spacecraft as compared to SpaceX's Dragon v2.
The Orion control panel looks like it would be much easier to use in a heavily vibrating, high-G rocket. It's a lot harder to fat-finger a tactile, physical button/switch than a touchscreen. Notice that the switches even have cages so that they can't get accidentally toggled.
Note also the use of colour on the Orion schematics that immediately directly the eyes to areas of alert or risk.
Whereas on the SpaceX consoles even the message 'All systems nominal' is rendered in a pale blue colour that merges in with the muted pastel palette. I challenge readers to find it quickly.
We already have popular IDEs guiding text input onto one of the few plausible symbols at a cursor; how long before a touchscreen app that gives your suggestions and snippets as touch targets, instead of a keyboard?
Well the choice is less obvious when your two options are an iPad or a throttlebook with jam-happy butterfly switches.
In all seriousness, too many of my Mac-loving friends and coworkers are using laptops that're 4+ years old because Apple decided shaving a millimeter off the thickness was worth cutting key travel by 60% and having display hinges crack off the frame. Considering how long most of them have been buying Apple they deserve better treatment.
As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps). Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
> phones and tablets are familiar, so too should in-vehicle touchscreens.
This too is so weird to me. I get that you want users to recognize an interface. And that it should mimic how you use other things. But at least put them in context.
I hope other brands start following Mazda again for this choice.