Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles • Hacker News Board

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#161

Post by theon144 » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 9:16 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #109

lobotryas wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#162

Post by ehnto » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 9:17 AM UTC

kkarakk wrote: post #130

ehnto wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sc…

Just don't use navigation guy, memorize the paper map! /s

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.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#163

Post by Ambroos » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 9:18 AM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #106

I'm a heavy Apple CarPlay user and I am delighted that my car (a 2016 Seat) has analogue controls that work with it. I know that when I'm required to use the on screen controls for certain functions, I am a less safe driver.

Yeah, my daily driver was an Audi with a rotary dial for about a year (no touchscreen at all), and Android Auto was great on it. You get to know the structure of all menus and can take actions blindly after a while. It's been almost a year since I've driven that car and I still know exactly what to press to show alternative routes in Google Maps, for example.

Later I had a bunch of rentals with touchscreen Android Auto, and it was less convenient and less safe than rotary dial Android Auto.

I wish Audi would've kept the rotary dial when they added a touchscreen in their latest infotainment revision.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#164

Post by throwayEngineer » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 9:19 AM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #10

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.

I find it fascinating to hear tech people hate on touch screens, when this is the best-in-class feature about Tesla. Can HN be consistent?

The reality is that people prefer more features than less, and buttons are not the best way.

What you probably hate are old, unresponsive automotive touch screens.

The future will use more microphones, be faster, use AI to predict what you want to do, etc....

But this seems like a "pop opinion", popular on the internet, but little basis in reality.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#165

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 9:21 AM UTC

afarrell wrote: post #113

TeMPOraL wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?)

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#166

Post by pbhjpbhj » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 9:22 AM UTC

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #134

grey-area wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these tactile controls are going to be deleted in the next decade as self driving cars go mainstream. This is a foolish move.

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.

But you don't need to interact with the car without looking, that's only for those driving, so tactile interfaces don't give much/any gain.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#167

Post by bigiain » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 9:24 AM UTC

rmrfchik wrote: post #97

haberman wrote: post #72

I'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."

But it does not. None of my trips are in calendar. None of my music is in Google Play or any stock music player. And the last thing I need in my car is phone interface.

Let me guess. Motorcycle rider? (_Fellow_ motorcycle rider...)

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#168

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 9:24 AM UTC

romwell wrote: post #152

atoav wrote: post #74

I 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 butto…

The world of musical instruments went through this decades ago. Yamaha DX7, one of the best-selling synths of all time, didn't have any knobs or sliders to edit its sounds. People loved the sounds, but editing them was so hard that few musicians did - that's why you can hear many DX7 stock presets in 80's music. The 90's were the dark ages of the synth. Even the buttons went away, everything was in a menu now. The sy…

The DX7 had one slider. If it had had knobs, it would have been much bigger and much more expensive.

And it wouldn't have been much easier to program, because it used a novel form of sound generation which most people still find hopelessly unintuitive.

A Germany company made a programming box for the DX7 with one-knob-per-feature. It was very expensive and sold very badly, even among professionals who could easily afford one - which suggests that the market for programmability really wasn't there, even with knobs.

People don't care about knobs. What they care about is simplicity. Synths like the Microbrute require virtually no mental effort. The sound design model is so simple virtually anyone of average intelligence can learn it in an afternoon. Within a few days they'll know most of what there is to know - which is how to make the same few stock sounds that analog synthesizers have been making since the 1970s.

This is fine for beginners but experts find it very limiting. Brian Eno loves his DX7, and the fact that you can set up the envelopes to make quasi-generative noises is a big part of the appeal. Most people don't get that far with it, but those that do aren't going to be happy with the very obvious limitations of a Microbrute.

Touch screens in cars are more complex. Having a map in a car is a useful thing, and there's no muscle memory. It's hard to see how you can replace drag/touch to set a destination with buttons that are less annoying and more intuitive.

But IME the big problem with touch screens is that they don't work. The screen in my car is resistive, so I have to keep poking at it to get a touch to register. The hybrid design - two rows of soft buttons, one knob, one screen - would be fine if the touch part actually worked.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#169

Post by numlock86 » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 9:25 AM UTC

From a consumer perspective as someone driving the new released Mazda 3 2019 (the one in the article) and previously owning a VW Tiguan with touchscreen in the center, I can say I am super happy with that decision, both from a practical standpoint (cleaning/wiping, yuck ...) and from a functional standpoint: It's just so much easier and less distracting to use the center dial. It takes a bit longer in some cases (navigating Android Auto for example) but it's worth it. And most things can be handled by 'OK Google' these days anyways.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#170

Post by dzhiurgis » Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 9:26 AM UTC

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #92

quakenul wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You drive car with pedals and steering wheel. Everything else that is ternary (music, climate, nav) is on touch screen.

So yes, you can have cabin light and temperature controls on touchscreen on an airplane.