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The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

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Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#151

Post by FullyFunctional »

seqastian wrote: post #100
degenerate wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still drive a 'dumb' car with actual buttons and knobs, because I loathe (with a passion) almost every car UI I have interacted with. I haven't been in a Tesla yet, but all the big makers (GM, Nissan, Audi, etc) get the interfaces so wrong, to the point where I assume it was their intention. I'd be interested to hear of any cars that get it right.

Biggest reason why i wouldn't get a Tesla. All i want is a Golf cart with doors and a plug for my phone really. Keep the 15" screen that sucks my battery dry.

Surprisingly (to me), I do use a lot of muscle memory with my Tesla UI: some of the most important controls are positions near corners and I hit them purely by feeling for the corners. So it's not as bad as you might think.

Re. screen sucking the battery dry, you might consider the energy needed to keep the car moving which complete dwarfs the few watts the screen takes. It's a complete nonissue.

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#152

Post by pavel_lishin »

albedoa wrote: post #119
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 drive a 2011 MINI Cooper S and have owned a 2007 and a 2003. Every generation has its share of wtf when it comes to dashboard switches. Take my biggest peeve, the blower switch on the 2011: If you press "increase" while at max blower, it stays at max blower. If you press "decrease" while at min blower, it turns off. If you press "decrease" while at off, it goes to min blower. So you can jam the blower to max withou…

> So you can jam the blower to max without looking, but if you overshoot on the way back down, it goes off and on again!

Seems like the "turn to lowest if decrease is pressed while off" was explicitly designed to overcome this issue.

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#153

Post by pavel_lishin »

charleyma wrote: post #3

Would also potentially add "voice control" to this list. It's amazing to me that by trying to be "innovative/modern", most car user interface designs have become increasingly user unfriendly. Case in point, the other day I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to connect my phone to a car via bluetooth (I'm still used to there just being a button for pairing). Ended up having to search online for the instruction…

> pairing is only available via voice command when the car is in park

I guess their policy is "fuck the mute and the non-English speakers"?

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#154

Post by beat »

wilsonnb2 wrote: post #139
beat wrote: post #133

This makes me think of another field where bad UI decisions took years to undo... synthesizers! The rise of digital synthesizers in the late 1980s led to an elimination of knobs and sliders, in favor of buttons and menus. This made it very difficult to design your own sounds for them, as sound manipulation was no longer physically intuitive, and working with interacting parameters could mean a lot of menu-digging rat…

There has been a resurgence in analog and analog-style synths since the 80's but overall I think synth UX has gotten even worse with the rise of software synths. Turning a virtual knob with a mouse pointer is a terrible UX. Mapping parameters to a midi keyboard is also pretty bad, with the exception of hardware like the Native Instruments S MK2 midi keyboards or the Maschine that are specifically built for controllin…

And even then, midi mapping is a pain. There are a few synth makers who have figured out good touch-based iPad synths, but for the most part, ugh. Emulators! Try playing a Minimoog correctly on a touch screen....

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#156

Post by seqastian »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #151
seqastian wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biggest reason why i wouldn't get a Tesla. All i want is a Golf cart with doors and a plug for my phone really. Keep the 15" screen that sucks my battery dry.

Surprisingly (to me), I do use a lot of muscle memory with my Tesla UI: some of the most important controls are positions near corners and I hit them purely by feeling for the corners. So it's not as bad as you might think. Re. screen sucking the battery dry, you might consider the energy needed to keep the car moving which complete dwarfs the few watts the screen takes. It's a complete nonissue.

Only if you expect to use the same car for inner cities, highways, short and long distance. As long as we are hauling a literal metric ton of steel to move 100 kilos of flesh and bones not much will change.

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#157

Post by Marsymars »

ce4 wrote: post #145
Marsymars wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a climate that has cold winters, and have Raynaud's syndrome. If it's cold outside, I wear -30C rated mountaineering mitts, and I'm fine, as long as I don't expose my hands to the cold . Touchscreens (and tiny steering wheel buttons) in cars are literally unusable for me for a good portion of the year.

Would actively heated mitts work, with exposed fingertips?

Probably, but they'd need a lot of heating. You lose a lot of insulation with exposed fingertips. Raynaud's starts from my fingertips, so they'd basically need enough heating to keep the fingertips warm via convection. (Plus I'm not sure how you'd do exposed fingertips on a mitt rather than a glove. If you just cut off the end of the mitt you've effectively just got a long sleeve with a thumb pocket.) I do have some wool gloves with exposed fingertips, but if I'm sedentary, they're only good for me down to a minimum of +5C or so.

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#158

Post by mirimir »

marbletiles wrote: post #55
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.

To restate the obvious: I don't need to look at anything to adjust the temperature. My arm knows where the knob is. But with touchscreens, there's no tactile feedback. They'd need almost full VR for that. Or maybe we could have touchscreens that grew "knobs" and stuff, to provide tactile feedback. Maybe use an electrical field to thicken areas of an LCD screen.

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#159

Post by mchahn »

It doesn't have to be a touchscreen. I drove my brother-in-law's porsche suv when it came out. It had physical buttons with a screen. You had to press through deep menus to do anything. I've used computers for decades and I couldn't figure out how to turn the radio off. I gave up and turned the volume to zero.

Re: The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

#160

Post by Angostura »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #85
Angostura wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just bought a car (with Carplay), but I was adamant that I would only have one that had physical buttons and volume knobs on the centre console. Sat in Tesla the other day and was really surprised about how awful the UI was in terms of information heirarchy. Everything seemed to have the same weight. A sea of clickable buttons.

Can I ask which brand you went with? I'm currently looking and have already tossed out several models I otherwise really wanted.

I'm in the UK - I went for a SEAT Alhambra (we tend to have to ferry our kids and their friends on camping holidays)
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