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The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

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Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#51

Post by santoshmaharshi »

Every screen I guess is a touch screen in some regards, say pointer-n-clik screen. Many such screens are so overcrowded these days, that you are playing a game of "Kill this pop up" to consume original content.

Browser notifications, Newsletter, Follow on Social, Special offers, etc etc

Regarding touch screen mentioned in this piece, the problem is those who created the product never use it and never it in original usage conditions. Many ATMS machines are filled with alighment problems to over confusing options.

Even their MENU & Navigation is not thought through

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#52

Post by hatty »

avoutthere wrote: post #50

This is why I will never own a Tesla Model 3. If I can't adjust the air conditioning while looking at the road, I don't want it.

You can set auto-climate control and will be able to change climate with voice in the future: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/952750646406426624?s=21

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#53

Post by namibj »

namdnay wrote: post #33
phlo wrote: post #26

This makes you appreciate the attention to detail, and the countless painfully learnt lessons, that goes into user interface design for airplanes. Compare a Cessna 400's cockpit [1] to a switch cluster in a recent Mini [2]. The car still has physical switches, which is better than a touchscreen. It's also styled to resemble an airplane cockpit. But all the switches look the same, and some of them have two positions w…

I don't think that's a lack of attention to detail from Mini. Just a decision made with the knowledge that people don't buy premium cars based on rational decisions. If they did, I'm not sure Mini (or BMW for that matter) would exist... I don't think this is the case for airplanes.

Are there any somewhat affordable cars that skimp on the "bling" to archive this sort of efficiency?

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#54

Post by carlob »

dbattaglia wrote: post #49

This is exactly why I dislike the new MBP touch bar. I spend much of my working day in IntelliJ, debugging Scala code. I so badly want to rest my fingers on the function keys while I step in/out/over code, just as I used to in Visual Studio debugging C# and C++. I recently tried the native touch bar support in the Early Access version of IntelliJ and it was really not any better. It's no fault of Jetbrains either, I…

Why did you buy it then? I think that all the marketing of "touchscreen: oooh shiny!" is working, and there is very little we can do about bad interfaces unless we vote with our feet.

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#55

Post by marbletiles »

mirimir wrote: post #30

So how are touchscreens OK, but using smartphones while driving isn't OK? I mean, I got pulled over once for a little lane wandering while adjusting the radio. Which had knobs.

Touchscreens probably aren't OK, is the point.

But more obviously: the current state of your air con isn't as deeply absorbing and distracting as, say, your Facebook feed. So one is pretty bad to be looking at while drive, the other is lethally dangerous.

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#56

Post by NeedMoreTea »

I sometimes feel I am in a minority of one these days.

Just about every car I've owned, I develop a muscle memory of where all the important switches are, and how far to turn to "hot enough" or "cool enough" etc. Same for most things around - I know fairly well how far to turn the oven for 180 +-10, no need to look. I might check if it's something especially sensitive (rare).

Thanks to iPhone (I have one, and like it) touch has become the answer to everything and that muscle memory doesn't work any more.

My current car is a pain in the arse as despite a dozen switches on the steering wheel they've forced simple functionality into the centre touch screen with awful UI where a simple switch would have worked fine.

Only Apple and a handful of others have any idea of usable UI - and even they aren't as hot as they once were. Anyone making appliances or cars is especially bad at UI. Worse if they decide to add helpful beeps. I don't want to be looking at anything in the car except the idiots outside it and the speedo. Nothing. Ever. Give me the damn switches back!

Heck even smart phones are a step back for use as a camera or phone. Old Sony-Ericssons had the ergonomics of a camera as well, including button and lens cover. Every feature phone could be answered (and most of a text written) without looking even once.

I really would like my stuff to move beyond this cargo cult of touch and keep it just for the iPhone.

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#57

Post by stillworks »

mirimir wrote: post #30

So how are touchscreens OK, but using smartphones while driving isn't OK? I mean, I got pulled over once for a little lane wandering while adjusting the radio. Which had knobs.

Playing the devil's advocate here... but it's easier to show advertisements if a screen is available ?

The skeptical side of me thinks that car manufacturers are simply preparing us slowly to accept screens in the car so that the next generation accepts it by default.

I recently switched to a car which is the outgoing generation of that particular model and (almost ironically) has a physical button on the dashboard to simply stow the screen away. One cannot even tell that there could be a screen there !

There still is a screen in the instrument clsuter but it's monochromatic and I have set it up to display the speed and a "sub-readout screen ?" to display fuel consumption. The instrument cluster screen is also capable of showing GPS direction instructions as well if the main screen is stowed away.

Everything else has a physical switch. The HVAC status is dispayed on it's dedicated LCD on the center console.

I like the outdated tech in my "new" car.

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#58

Post by digi_owl »

kjeetgill wrote: post #46
leejo wrote: post #39

Touch screens and mixed user interfaces on things like cash machines, petrol pumps, etc kind of bother me - maybe later posts will go into this as the blog ends saying there will be a follow-up. Just a couple of anecdotes - the first being cash machines where I input the PIN using the traditional buttons on the numeric pad, then i start using the touchscreen to make other choices. Pick one or the other, not a mixture…

I think the mixed mode works really well. Touchscreens are pretty natural and intuitive, especially for things like ATMs, but you can't have braille on ATM touch screens so you need the buttons no matter what. At least in the US they usually have headphone jacks to replace the information presented on the screen though, and since you have a screen you might as well make it a touch screen.

> Touchscreens are pretty natural and intuitive

Try to watch someone in their 60s operate them and you will learn that the are anything but.

My dad find them endlessly frustrating, as his first instinct when talking about something in an image or something is to put his finger on it. But that invariably triggers something on such a screen.

He also struggles with things like Google Maps on a PC with a scroll mouse, as to him the natural action is to "pull" the map closer rather than "zoom in". End result is that he often find himself scrolling the wrong way...

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#59

Post by InternetOfStuff »

orbital-decay wrote: post #5

On the other hand, many MFDs in recent plane cockpits, including military ones, were replaced or at least augmented with touch screens. That's probably not just a fashionable trend, since the avionics and particularily instrument displays are subject to much higher scrutiny than car entertainment systems, and must work and be accessible in much harsher conditions. That said, I'd love to see some serious research on t…

While I can easily see particular situations where touchscreens would be useful, I feel it would be extremely annoying to lose the sense of position afforded by physical buttons.

1. I'm a guitarist.

It's super annoying when a string breaks, even if I'm not using it. My fingers can feel even the adjacency of the string (vibrations, I'm guessing), and I lose all sense of orientation on the freatboard if one of the strings is gone, even if I'm not touching that string.

2. While I'm not a pilot, I spent years testing avionics.

Years later, I can still blindly, through muscle memory, replay sequences of commands in my mind, as actuated by mechanical buttons (LSKs) on either side of the display, and rotary encoders to "dial in" new values (e.g. frequencies).

I would usually run through the settings just with my hands, barely looking, and only double-check the settings as the last step, before actually committing to whatever action I was preparing.

I can't imagine doing something similar on a touchscreen without constantly havng to look.

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#60

Post by digi_owl »

michaelgrafl wrote: post #41
leejo wrote: post #39

Touch screens and mixed user interfaces on things like cash machines, petrol pumps, etc kind of bother me - maybe later posts will go into this as the blog ends saying there will be a follow-up. Just a couple of anecdotes - the first being cash machines where I input the PIN using the traditional buttons on the numeric pad, then i start using the touchscreen to make other choices. Pick one or the other, not a mixture…

I think the only situation in which I prefer a touchscreen to anything else is when the function of the device completely changes a lot and I can't have keyboard and mouse. Re: calibration: In Austria we have touchscreens for buying train tickets at the station. As a tall person looking down on the screen I always have to factor in some offset, touching slightly beneath the thing I want to hit. Not that bad with big…

An older solution there is soft buttons around the edges.

Older ATMs used them to allow you to make context sensitive choices, while also having the numeric pad.

And now i find myself pondering a "smartphone" with rows of buttons along the longer edges of the screen...

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