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Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

motorauthority.com

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Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#61

Post by antocv »

I assumed since 2001, that soon a car will be made, where all the functions can be accessed with eyes still on the road. Just from the wheel, like the paddles, and buttons for thumbs on the wheel. Anything extra, just place your hand slightly from the wheel and immediately feel what you are about to switch and adjust. Imagine to access any function of the car in complete darkness just by the feel.

None of this bullshit, where buttons are far from each other, moving hands up and down left and right to change temperature, turn air-conditioning on/off. Where driver needs to glance down to steer hand into damn buttons. Where "infotainment" needs to show you anything at all about what you are listening to - as if you dont hear it. Keep information to a minimum, ffs.

Then we got touchscreens instead - now you cant even drive in full darkness and feel some buttons with your hand to adjust. There is not even a Night Mode.

Are car manufacturers really this bad? Yep. Tesla included.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#62

Post by isoprophlex »

diggan wrote: post #8

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.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#63

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

marapuru wrote: post #47

Praise to Mazda for making this decision. 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. >…

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.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#64

Post by gambiting »

cm2187 wrote: post #53
marapuru wrote: post #47

Praise to Mazda for making this decision. 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. >…

Agree, except when you need to type a name.

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.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#65

Post by Yizahi »

Speaking about tactile controls - once I got Audi in rental, it had tilt controls near the central knob and they were very good (and stylish enough for general adoption). I could find them without much searching blindly and trigger any of their positions the first try, zero errors. Very nice and intuitive (after you remember what they do of course). See picture here, two silver fins between navigation knob and gearbox, they tilt to front and back: https://cdn2.autoexpress.co.uk/sites/autoexpressuk/files/201...

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#66

Post by Arbalest »

petepete wrote: post #60

It's a case of picking the right tool for the job, touchscreens aren't entirely awful. But if I'm driving and I want to switch to Radio, the button should always be in the exact same place so I don't need to think. My car has buttons for all these operations and it's great. What is bad for is browsing the map when I'm parked; say I'm looking for a car park near my destination, by the time I've zoomed out with a scrol…

> the button should always be in the exact same place so I don't need to think.

I don't think that thinking is the problem, the problem is looking to locate.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#68

Post by torgian »

Causality1 wrote: post #27
checker659 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why you don't program on a tablet I dare you to go tell that to /r/apple :)

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…

Heh, a throttle book with jam-happy switches.I'm stealing that the next time someone asks me why I haven't upgraded from my 5 year old MacBook pro.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#69

Post by gambiting »

jacquesm wrote: post #58
kkarpkkarp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The proper way to do this is by voice input.

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.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#70

Post by Manfred »

jacquesm wrote: post #58
kkarpkkarp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The proper way to do this is by voice input.

Which doesn’t really work when you have screaming children (or adults) in the car.
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