Thank fuck, and I hope the rest of the automotive industry follows suit: I have never felt less safe operating a vehicle than when I have had to adjust some car setting fifteen nested menu items deep while rolling down the highway in an unfamiliar rental at 65 miles per hour.
Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
71–80 of 974 posts
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#72I'm curious, have you used Android Auto? You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar. It has all of your contacts and your music. As a user these are the things that matter to me, not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#73I haven't used a car in years, but I do use taxies or DiDi, or Uber, depending on which country I'm in.
With Uber or Didi especially, you get picked up in cars that have these touchscreens. I've never seen a driver use them for anything other than radio operation. They use their phones for GPS navigation.
And in the nicer cars (BMWs, Mercs, etc) the touchscreens just destroy the aesthetics of the car's interior. Horrible looking.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#74I don't even think you have to be defensive about it.
Touchscreens can make sense for things where you need to have a flexible interface and cannot afford your physical interface to look like the cockpit of an airplane.
But for everything that is even a tiny bit critical you usually want to avoid it if possible. This is why even 50k€ cinema cameras like the Arri Alexa swear on knobs and buttons.
The things with buttons, levers and knobs is that they are expensive and very few designers/engineers are good at designing interfaces with them – either because they are not creative enough to get the optimal solution or because they are not pragmatic enough to test their creative solution to the core.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#75I was actually pondering buying a Mazda, but now I am not so sure. Generally I get the idea - please give me hardware buttons for radio/music volume, temperature control, or to toggle suspension modes or whatever. But I want to use e.g. the Spotify on my phone, and Google Maps. Someone further down commented that it seemed to him that car makers have given up on their own branded version if car software, and ohmygod yes, thanks. It was always an afterthought and poorly thought out, buggy and much less functional.
So please, maybe find a middle ground, as I said - car functionality with hardware knobs, and a touchscreen for stuff like navigation (where you need the sreen anyway), and music control. Otherwise it will get worse - then I can use the hardware button to select my BT input an dhave to fiddle around on my much smaller phone screen. No one can actually want that, if the alternative is to use a condensed version of that interface on a bigger screen...
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#76Good. 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…
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.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#77I'm curious, have you used Android Auto? You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar. It has all of your contacts and your music. As a user these are the things that matter to me, not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."
I can say the same for Apple CarPlay. Having tactile controls is nice but completely removing the touch screen is not a good thing. If there's one thing that most car manufacturers aren't great at, it's with their car infotainment system UX UI and functionality.
The only reason GM’s is best is because they’ve finally acquiesced and admitted that Apple and Google do it better and their UX reflects that
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#78I'm curious, have you used Android Auto? You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar. It has all of your contacts and your music. As a user these are the things that matter to me, not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."
Indeed, using Android Auto daily i'm happy I have basically nearly nothing to do in VWs UX.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#79Good. 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…
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.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#80Good. 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…
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.